Abstract
A major reason for our communication is to influence our conversational partners. This is so both if our preferences are aligned, and when they are not. In the latter case, our communicative acts are meant to manipulate our partners. We all know that attempts to manipulate are nothing out of the ordinary. Unfortunately, the standard theory of rational communicative behavior predicts that any such attempt will be seen through and is thus useless. The main aim of this chapter is to investigate which assumptions of the standard theory we have to give up to account for our communicative behavior, when preferences between partners are not aligned.
We would like to thank Frank Zenker for valuable comments and corrections and the participants of the Bayesian argumentation workshop for useful discussion.
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Notes
- 1.
Though see de Jaegher (2003) for more discussion.
- 2.
The argument used to prove the result is normally called the unraveling argument. See Jager et al. (to appear) for a slightly different version.
- 3.
As noted by Shin (1994), the unraveling argument is extremely sensitive to any uncertainty concerning what the informed parties actually know. To give a very simple example, suppose that T = {t1, t2}, but that the decision maker is not sure whether the sender knows the true state. Then, if the sender announces that the true state is either t1 or t2, the decision maker cannot appeal to the unraveling argument to conclude that t1 is the true state. There is now a positive probability that the seller is genuinely uninformed and is in fact telling the whole truth. Still, one can prove a generalization of the result of Milgrom and Roberts that there always exists a sequential equilibrium \( \left\langle {\sigma, { }\rho, { }\mu } \right\rangle \) of the persuasion game in which the disclosure strategy σ is perfectly revealing in the sense that the sender will say exactly what he knows.
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van Rooij, R., de Jaegher, K. (2013). Argumentation with (Bounded) Rational Agents. In: Zenker, F. (eds) Bayesian Argumentation. Synthese Library, vol 362. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5357-0_8
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