Information-Theoretic Approach to Strategic Communication as a Hierarchical Game

By Emrah Akyol, Cédric Langbort, Tamer Basar. 2015

126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyzes the information disclosure problems originated in economics through the lens of information theory. Such problems are radically different from the conventional communication paradigms in information theory since they involve different objectives for the encoder and the decoder, which are aware of this mismatch and act accordingly. This leads, in our setting, to a hierarchical communication game, where the transmitter announces an encoding strategy with full commitment, and its distortion measure depends on a private information sequence whose realization is available at the transmitter. The receiver decides on its decoding strategy that minimizes its own distortion based on the announced encoding map and the statistics. Three problem settings are considered, focusing on the quadratic distortion measures, and jointly Gaussian source and private information: compression, communication, and the simple equilibrium conditions without any compression or communication. The equilibrium strategies and associated costs are characterized. The analysis is then extended to the receiver side information setting and the major changes in structure of optimal strategies are identified. Finally, an extension of the results to the broader context of decentralized stochastic control is presented.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Management Science and Operations Research

How researchers see this paper

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In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Emrah Akyol
2. Cédric Langbort
3. Tamer Basar

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Emrah Akyol
2. Tamer Basar
3. Cédric Langbort

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Emrah Akyol
2. Tamer Basar
3. Cédric Langbort

Citations in the corpus

• Price of Transparency in Strategic Machine Learning (2016, methodology): “In this paper, leveraging the recent results on strategic communication in [6], and using the well-known results in vector quantization theory, we analyze the impact of strategic intent of data provider on the design and performance of transparent ML algorithms.”