Signaling in Social Interactions: a Multidisciplinary Approach

8-9 June 2022
Organizers
Olivier Bos (ENS Paris-Saclay)
Christina Pawlowitsch (Panthéon-Assas University)

Program

8-9 June 2022

When Michael Spence, in 1973, presented his model on signaling in the job market, he affirmed that the term “market signaling” was “not exactly a part of the well-defined technical vocabulary of the economist.” This has changed now. Today, thanks to Spence’s contribution and the work that builds on it, the theory of costly signaling is part of the well-established set of tools and the language of economics. And, the theory continues to inspire new theoretical work as well as applications.

Signaling is not a mechanism introduced from above (by the state or some other institution) but is the spontaneous reaction of self-interested individuals (or other organisms) to asymmetries in information. Signaling pops up naturally in markets (education as a costly signal in the job market, dividend payments as a signal in financial markets, advertising as a signal in the markets of goods and services), social interaction (status and courtship signals), biological interaction (signals in mating, parasite-host and predator-prey interaction), and in language (language competences as carriers of educational signal, code-switching and style-shifting as signals of social competences).

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from various disciplines (economics, mathematics, computer science, sociology, biology, linguistics) who explore signaling phenomena by the use of formal, game-theoretic models.

We have organized a first workshop on this topic in 2019. We hope that this new workshop will, as the last foster new discussions and international collaborations.

Financial support