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Cheap Talk, Reinforcement Learning, and the Emergence of Cooperation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

J. McKenzie Alexander
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Abstract

Cheap talk has often been thought incapable of supporting the emergence of cooperation because costless signals, easily faked, are unlikely to be reliable. I show how, in a social network model of cheap talk with reinforcement learning, cheap talk does enable the emergence of cooperation, provided that individuals also temporally discount the past. This establishes one mechanism that suffices for moving a population of initially uncooperative individuals to a state of mutually beneficial cooperation even in the absence of formal institutions.

Type
Game Theory and Formal Models
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , December 2015 , pp. 969 - 982
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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