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We explore the expression of personality and adaptivity through the gestures of virtual agents in a storytelling task. We conduct two experiments using four different dialogic stories. We manipulate agent personality on the extraversion…
Disinformation campaigns can distort public perception and destabilize institutions. Understanding how different populations respond to information is crucial for designing effective interventions, yet real-world experimentation is…
To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…
Democratic societies increasingly rely on communication networks to aggregate citizen preferences and information, yet these same networks can systematically mislead voters under certain conditions. We introduce an agent-based model that…
We study a Bayesian persuasion setting in which a sender wants to persuade a critical mass of receivers by revealing partial information about the state to them. The homogeneous binary-action receivers are located on a communication…
Communication is secret if a message is independent of the state; however, the receiver's subsequent action may still reveal that she has acted on hidden information. This paper studies when secret communication can also provide plausible…
This paper studies how the possibility of strategic misreporting shapes endogenous communication networks. Agents observe noisy private signals about a common state, form costly communication links, exchange private messages with their…
A Bayesian agent experiences gain-loss utility each period over changes in belief about future consumption ("news utility"), with diminishing sensitivity over the magnitude of news. Diminishing sensitivity induces a preference over news…
When some resources are to be distributed among a set of agents following egalitarian social welfare, the goal is to maximize the utility of the agent whose utility turns out to be minimal. In this context, agents can have an incentive to…
Persuasion through conversation has been the focus of much research. Nudging is a popular strategy to influence decision-making in physical and digital settings. However, conversational agents employing "nudging" have not received…
Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and…
We study an extension of the voter model in which each agent is endowed with an innate preference for one of two states that we term as "truth" or "falsehood". Due to interactions with neighbors, an agent that innately prefers truth can be…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…
We explore the ability of large language models (LLMs) to engage in subtle deception through strategically phrasing and intentionally manipulating information. This harmful behavior can be hard to detect, unlike blatant lying or…
In communities with social hierarchies, fear of judgment can discourage communication. While anonymity may alleviate some social pressure, fully anonymous spaces enable toxic behavior and hide the social context that motivates people to…
As large language models are deployed as autonomous agents, their capacity for strategic deception raises core questions for coordination, reliability, and safety in multi-goal, multi-agent systems. We study deception and communication in…
Warning: This research studies AI persuasion and bias amplification that could be misused; all experiments are for safety evaluation. Large Language Models (LLMs) now generate convincing, human-like text and are widely used in content…
Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of…
A principal and $n\ge 2$ agents can launch a project if the principal proposes it and at least $k$ agents accept. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an ex ante unknown state. The principal can conduct a test to learn about…
Communication is rarely perfect, but rather prone to error of transmission and reception. Often the origin of these errors cannot be properly quantified and is thus imprecisely known. We analyze the impact of an ambiguous noise which may…