Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T20:03:17.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ambiguity Is Kinda Good Sometimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Cailin O’Connor
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In a recent article, Carlos Santana shows that in common interest signaling games when signals are costly and when receivers can observe contextual environmental cues, ambiguous signaling strategies outperform precise ones and can, as a result, evolve. I show that if one assumes a realistic structure on the state space of a common interest signaling game, ambiguous strategies can be explained without appeal to contextual cues. I conclude by arguing that there are multiple types of cases of payoff-beneficial ambiguity, some of which are better explained by Santana’s models and some of which are better explained by models presented here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 110 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

Many thanks to Carlos Santana, Brian Skyrms, Simon Huttegger, Louis Narens, James Weatherall, and Justin Bruner for comments on this work.

References

Crawford, Vincent P., and Sobel, Joel. 1982. “Strategic Information Transfer.” Econometrica 50 (6): 1431–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard. 2007. “The Evolution of Convex Categories.” Linguistics and Philosophy 30:551–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jäger, Gerhard, Metzger, Lars P., and Riedel, Frank. 2011. “Voronoi Languages: Equilibria in Cheap-Talk Games with High-Dimensional Types and Few Signals.” Games and Economic Behavior 73 (2): 517–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David K. 1969. Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
O’Connor, Cailin. 2014a. “The Evolution of Vagueness.” Erkenntnis 79 (4): 707–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Cailin. 2014b. “Evolving Perceptual Categories.” Philosophy of Science 81 (5), forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Santana, Carlos. 2014. “Ambiguity in Cooperative Signaling.” Philosophy of Science 81 (3): 398–422.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Benthem, Johan. 2001. “Economics and Language.” In Economics and Language, ed. Borgers, T.., van Benthem, J., and Rubsenstein, A., 97–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar