Game-Theoretic Pragmatics under Conflicting and Common Interests

Abstract

This paper combines a survey of existing literature in game-theoretic pragmatics with new models that fill some voids in that literature. We start with an overview of signaling games with a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, and show that the literature on such games can be classified into models with direct, costly, noisy and imprecise signals. We then argue that this same subdivision can be used to classify signaling games with common interests, where we fill some voids in the literature. For each of the signaling games treated, we show how equilibrium-refinement arguments and evolutionary arguments can be interpreted in the light of pragmatic inference.