Europäische Wissenschaftstage in Steyr

ESD Summer School 2010

Scientific Director: Diego Gambetta, Oxford University

Signaling theory and applications in the social and biological sciences

Key question: Signaling theory (ST) emerged from economics and biology in the mid-70s (Spence, Zahavi, Grafen) and is now applied in other fields. It tackles a fundamental problem of communication: how can an agent, the receiver, establish whether another agent, the signaller, is telling or otherwise conveying the truth about a state of affairs or event which the signaller might have an interest to misrepresent? And, conversely, how can the signaller persuade the receiver that he is telling the truth, whether he is telling it or not? This two-pronged question potentially arises every time the interests between signallers and receivers diverge or collide and there is asymmetric information, namely the signaller is in a better position to know the truth than the receiver is.

The school will first present the theory’s solution to this question, the history of the idea, and then a series of tests and applications of the theory in a variety of fields. The school will have 7 lecturers, each of whom will present one unit composed of one lecture and one seminar.