| Description: |
Signaling is a basic research topic in several disciplines, such as philosophy, biology, and economics. In its simplest form it can be modeled as information exchange between a sender and a receiver. The course will take such simple models as starting point and proceed to more complex models which involve issues like conflict of interest between sender and receiver, deception, structured signals, and so on. One recurrent topic is the question whether an evolutionary or learning process can lead to states of communication. Most of the modeling uses concepts from game theory and evolutionary game theory. Therefore, the course will start with a brief introduction to evolutionary game theory. More subtle concepts and methods will be introduced along the way by working through the literature. The literature will include theoretical papers as well as papers on signaling experiments from economics and biology. |