Achievable Rates for Strategic Communication

Abstract

We introduce the problem of strategic communication and find achievable rates for this problem. The problem consists of a sender that observes a source and a receiver that would like to recover the source. The sender can send messages to the receiver over a noiseless medium whose input space is as large as the space of source signals. However, unlike standard communication, the sender is strategic. Depending on the source signal it receives, the sender may have an incentive, measured by a utility function, to misreport the signal, whereby, not all signals are necessarily recoverable at the receiver. The dilemma for the receiver lies in selecting the right signals to recover so that recovery happens with high probability. We establish achievable rates associated with these settings.