© John Haslam

Game Theory and the Evolution of Signaling (CMU)

(Spring 2008)

The evolution of simple languages, known as signaling systems, has received a lot of recent attention from game theorists in philosophy, biology, and economics; this will be the focus of our course. In the first half, we will look at several evolutionary and learning models of “costless” signaling. In addition to analyzing the plausibility of these as models for the evolution of proto-languages, we will consider the ways this model has been applied to some old philosophical problems (convention, meaning, natural kinds, and the descriptive/normative distinction). One handy feature of signaling games is that many different modeling strategies have been applied to them. This will give us an opportunity to see the variety of strategies used in this fast expanding literature.

In the second half of the course we will turn to different models of the evolution of language which relax the pure common interest assumption. Here we will look at the problem of “signal cost” (e.g. “handicaps”) and attempt to determine the extent to which this feature expands the set of explanations available for the evolution of simple languages. Costly signaling has been used primarily by both biologists and economists and we will have a look at the similarities between these two approaches.

• Syllabus
• Week 2 notes
• Week 3 notes
• Week 4 notes
• Week 5 notes
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• Week 7 notes
• Week 8 notes
• Week 9 notes
• Week 10 notes
• Week 11 notes
• Week 12 notes
• Week 13 notes