Conversations (This Version -- July 2025)
Abstract: In a conversation interlocutors talk without constraints on talking order or duration. The contents of simultaneous messages are assumed to get lost. By equating messages with disclosures of singleton subsets of interlocutors' possibility sets we endow them with literal meanings. Literal-meaning strategies minimize inferences from disclosures. All other strategies are pragmatic-meaning strategies. With common knowledge of possibility sets' sizes, optimal literal-meaning strategies let only the better-informed player talk. Optimal pragmatic-meaning strategies are strictly better and generally require that with positive probability both players talk simultaneously. With uncertain sizes of possibility sets, both players talk also in optimal literal-meaning strategies.
Correlation though Language Games (This Version -- August 2025)
Abstract: A language game is a finite complete-information game preceded by public pre-play communication with constraints on players' ability to produce and understand messages and on their knowledge of each other's constraints. The paper gives conditions under which it is possible to induce correlated equilibria outside the convex hull of the set of Nash equilibria through simple language games with only a few communication rounds. This is especially relevant for two-player games, in which unmediated communication is necessarily public. In the game of Chicken one can induce the entire set of correlated equilibria via a language game.
Strategic Information Transmission in the Employment Relationship (This Version -- June 2025)
Abstract: Formal procedures for dealing with information in organizations may be costly to set up. Informal ones may be more vulnerable to opportunism. We study the tradeoffs by introducing strategic communication a la Crawford and Sobel (1982) into Simon's (1951) model of the employment relationship. A contract specifies the principal's ``range of authority" and a fixed wage for the agent. With extreme conflict, optimal contracts minimize the range of authority and preclude communication. With little conflict they maximize the range of authority and induce influential communication. In the uniform-quadratic case, they divide the state space into approximately equal-sized topics.
Meaning in Communication Games (This Version -- August 2025)
Abstract: I explore the role of a pre-existing language in strategic communication. A sender-receiver game combined with a language, modeled as a pure receiver strategy, is a language game. The sender deliberates by iterating pure-strategy best replies, starting from the language, while provisionally dropping unused messages. This process converges to a limit set of strategies in a reduced game. A minimal enlargement of this limit set contains a best reply to every belief concentrated on it, and hence supports an equilibrium of the reduced game. With a common language this equilibrium can be extended to the entire game by restoring dropped messages and is then a language equilibrium. The paper proposes a generalization to games with language uncertainty. Every finite language game has a language equilibrium, which predicts language use.