Game Theory and Communication

Abstract

This chapter looks at recent attempts to shed light on communication using game theory. It is divided into three parts. First, motivations for a game-theoretic approach to communication are briefly investigated. In the second part, one of the most fully developed game-theoretic accounts of communication is examined: Prashant Parikh’s post-Gricean utterance-by-utterance account (Parikh 1990, 1991, 2001). Doubts are raised about some of the aspects of Parikh’s treatment and suggestions are made for refinements of cost factors to improve predictive power. A more fundamental problem is that the model drops a Gricean constraint on inference in communication. I argue that this leaves it without an account of the content of implicatures. Some comparisons are made with relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95), a non-game-theoretic utterance-by-utterance account of communication, which retains a form of the Gricean constraint.

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