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Ambiguity Is Kinda Good Sometimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Cailin O’Connor
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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.

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

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Footnotes

†

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

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