SCOCOS

Many strategic and dynamic interactions are characterized by asymmetric information: one party possesses private information (the sender) and one uninformed decision-maker (the receiver) observes a signal from the sender. These games exhibit their relevance across numerous domains in economics, including instances like job market signaling, where candidates communicate their qualifications to potential employers; reputation analysis, where individuals build and manage their reputations in various social and professional contexts; and within financial markets, where firms signal their financial well-being to entice investors. Signaling games, in which the sender's signal is costly, play a critical role in comprehending advertising strategies within the business realm, where companies use signals to convey product quality to consumers. Our research project aims at studying the strategic communication between senders (e.g., employees, entrepreneurs, lobbyists, food producers) and receivers (e.g. employers, banks, politicians, consumers), taking into account that signals can be either costless or costly. It will go beyond the current literature by studying strategic communication in dynamic environments where (i) senders have access to both cheap talk messages and costly signals; (ii) several agents (playing the role of both senders and receivers) convey information dynamically to their friends/neighbors in a network; (iii) communication is imperfect and both sender and receiver have time constraints to write or read messages, forcing the sender to summarize his arguments and preventing him to convey all the details; (iv) senders may have access to partially verifiable information; and (v) there are platform algorithms which are analyzed in the context of platform-advertiser communication. We will use the formalism of game theory to study the strategic incentives of agents.