Long Persuasion Games

This paper characterizes geometrically the set of all Nash equilibrium payoffs achievable with unmediated communication in persuasion games, i.e., games with an informed expert and an uninformed decisionmaker in which the expert's information is certifiable. The first equilibrium characterization is provided for unilateral persuasion games, and the second for multistage, bilateral persuasion games. As in Aumann and Hart (2003), we use the concepts of diconvexification and dimartingale. A leading example illustrates both geometric characterizations and shows how the expert, whatever his type, can increase his equilibrium payoff compared to all equilibria of the unilateral persuasion game by delaying information certification.cheap talk, communication, diconvexification, dimartingale, disclosure of certifiable information, jointly controlled lotteries, long conversation, persuasion, verifiable types

Persuasion Games with Higher Order Uncertainty

In persuasion games, it is well known that a perfectly revealing equilibrium may fail to exist when the decision maker is uncertain about the interested party\'s payoff-relevant information. However, by explicitly integrating higher order uncertainty into the information structure, this paper shows that a perfectly revealing equilibrium does exist when disclosures are not restrained to intervals of the payoff-relevant state space. On the contrary, when payoff-irrelevant disclosures are impossible, a perfectly revealing equilibrium fails to exist as long as there is a strictly positive probability that the decision maker does not know whether the interested party is informed or not. In this case, a partially revealing equilibrium and associated inferences are characterized.Strategic information revelation; Persuasion games; Higher order uncertainty; Provability

Multistage communication with and without verifiable types

We survey the main results on strategic information transmission, which is often referred to as ``persuasion" when types are verifiable and as ``cheap talk" when they are not. In the simplest ``cheap talk'' model, an informed player sends a single message to a receiver who makes a decision. The players' utilities depend on the sender's information and the receiver's decision, but not on the sender's message. Furthermore, the messages that are available to the sender do not depend on his true information. As is well-known, such a unilateral ``cheap talk" can affect the sender's decision at equilibrium. In a more general model, both players can exchange simultaneous costless messages during several stages before the final decision. The utility functions are unchanged. Multistage conversation allows the players to reach more equilibrium outcomes, which possibly Pareto dominate the original ones. More precisely, the set of equilibrium outcomes of long cheap talk games is fully characterized; it increases with the number of communication stages and can become even larger if no deadline is imposed. Concentrating on cheap talk is not appropriate if the informed player can influence the decision maker by producing unfalsifiable documents. In order to capture this possibility formally, one assumes that the informed player's set of messages depends on his private information. The literature has mostly dealt with unilateral persuasion. But multistage, bilateral communication enables the players to reach more equilibrium outcomes in the case of verifiable types as in the case of unverifiable ones. Equilibria of long persuasion games are fully characterized when information can be certified at any precision level.Cheap talk; certification; incomplete information; information transmission; jointly controlled lotteries; verifiable types

Serious Financial Games for Youth: An Evolutionary Action Design Science Approach

Supporting lifelong financial education through games for youth requires intricate design consideration of immersion, persuasion, personalization, and evolution. This is important as it ensures the knowledge and skills learnt from the games can be applied in the long term. Furthermore, it serves as a foundation to enable learning, and to learn how to learn. Studying this phenomenon may require calibrated design science methodologies to appropriately address those challenges. Traditionally, a design science approach focuses on creating research artefacts limited to specific timeframes and socio-technological interactions. However, when a design study targets on the orientation of lifelong learning, extant research on design methodologies seem incompatible. This paper proposes methodological contributions that are philosophically oriented in design and are also compatible with lifelong learning

The Rhetoric of Video Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning Bogost's chapter offers an introduction to rhetoric in games. First he looks at the way games and their rules embody cultural values, following the work of Brian Sutton-Smith and looking in particular at a few examples from international sports. Then he discusses the relationship between games and ideology, showing how game play can unpack and expose deeply engrained social, cultural, and political assumptions. Finally he discusses the ways videogames make arguments. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, Bogost introduces a notion he calls "procedural rhetoric," the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions

Long-Horizon Dialogue Understanding for Role Identification in the Game of Avalon with Large Language Models

Deception and persuasion play a critical role in long-horizon dialogues between multiple parties, especially when the interests, goals, and motivations of the participants are not aligned. Such complex tasks pose challenges for current Large Language Models (LLM) as deception and persuasion can easily mislead them, especially in long-horizon multi-party dialogues. To this end, we explore the game of Avalon: The Resistance, a social deduction game in which players must determine each other's hidden identities to complete their team's objective. We introduce an online testbed and a dataset containing 20 carefully collected and labeled games among human players that exhibit long-horizon deception in a cooperative-competitive setting. We discuss the capabilities of LLMs to utilize deceptive long-horizon conversations between six human players to determine each player's goal and motivation. Particularly, we discuss the multimodal integration of the chat between the players and the game's state that grounds the conversation, providing further insights into the true player identities. We find that even current state-of-the-art LLMs do not reach human performance, making our dataset a compelling benchmark to investigate the decision-making and language-processing capabilities of LLMs. Our dataset and online testbed can be found at our project website: https://sstepput.github.io/Avalon-NLU/Comment: Accepted to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Human-Agent Decision-making: Combining Theory and Practice

Extensive work has been conducted both in game theory and logic to model strategic interaction. An important question is whether we can use these theories to design agents for interacting with people? On the one hand, they provide a formal design specification for agent strategies. On the other hand, people do not necessarily adhere to playing in accordance with these strategies, and their behavior is affected by a multitude of social and psychological factors. In this paper we will consider the question of whether strategies implied by theories of strategic behavior can be used by automated agents that interact proficiently with people. We will focus on automated agents that we built that need to interact with people in two negotiation settings: bargaining and deliberation. For bargaining we will study game-theory based equilibrium agents and for argumentation we will discuss logic-based argumentation theory. We will also consider security games and persuasion games and will discuss the benefits of using equilibrium based agents.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2015, arXiv:1606.0729

Algorithmic Bayesian Persuasion

Persuasion, defined as the act of exploiting an informational advantage in order to effect the decisions of others, is ubiquitous. Indeed, persuasive communication has been estimated to account for almost a third of all economic activity in the US. This paper examines persuasion through a computational lens, focusing on what is perhaps the most basic and fundamental model in this space: the celebrated Bayesian persuasion model of Kamenica and Gentzkow. Here there are two players, a sender and a receiver. The receiver must take one of a number of actions with a-priori unknown payoff, and the sender has access to additional information regarding the payoffs. The sender can commit to revealing a noisy signal regarding the realization of the payoffs of various actions, and would like to do so as to maximize her own payoff assuming a perfectly rational receiver. We examine the sender's optimization task in three of the most natural input models for this problem, and essentially pin down its computational complexity in each. When the payoff distributions of the different actions are i.i.d. and given explicitly, we exhibit a polynomial-time (exact) algorithm, and a "simple" $(1-1/e)$-approximation algorithm. Our optimal scheme for the i.i.d. setting involves an analogy to auction theory, and makes use of Border's characterization of the space of reduced-forms for single-item auctions. When action payoffs are independent but non-identical with marginal distributions given explicitly, we show that it is #P-hard to compute the optimal expected sender utility. Finally, we consider a general (possibly correlated) joint distribution of action payoffs presented by a black box sampling oracle, and exhibit a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) with a bi-criteria guarantee. We show that this result is the best possible in the black-box model for information-theoretic reasons