The Information Economics of Social Interactions

Abstract

When animals should attend to information is a diverse and fascinating topic, with answers ranging from neurological mechanisms to evolutionary forces. The broad theme of this thesis is examining learning and information use and social interactions from a game theoretical perspective, but I use this framework to address two distinct topics. The first half of my thesis is a fairly traditional investigation hypotheses about animals’ use of social information in uncertain environments, and how social information use fits within the broader interaction of environmental certainty and information reliability. The second half introduces the more novel topic of behavioral conventions, or coordination problems with multiple equilibria, and how topics in behavioral ecology can benefit from a conventions perspective. Through investigating conventions in general, and conventional communication specifically, I develop a novel laboratory system for investigating learned conventional communication.