TY - JOUR
T1 - Information-Theoretic Approach to Strategic Communication as a Hierarchical Game
AU - Akyol, Emrah
AU - Langbort, Cedric
AU - Basar, Tamer
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) under Grant FA9550-10-1-0573
Publisher Copyright:
© 1963-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2017/2
Y1 - 2017/2
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Game theory
KW - Gaussian random variables
KW - hierarchical decision making
KW - information theory
KW - optimality
KW - side information
KW - strategic communication
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U2 - 10.1109/JPROC.2016.2575858
DO - 10.1109/JPROC.2016.2575858
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84979944543
SN - 0018-9219
VL - 105
SP - 205
EP - 218
JO - Proceedings of the IEEE
JF - Proceedings of the IEEE
IS - 2
M1 - 7524783
ER -