EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A Theory of Deception

David Ettinger () and Philippe Jehiel ()

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper proposes an equilibrium approach to belief manipulation and deception in which agents only have coarse knowledge of their opponent's strategy. Equilibrium requires the coarse knowledge available to agents to be correct, and the inferences and optimizations to be made on the basis of the simplest theories compatible with the available knowledge. The approach can be viewed as formalizing into a game theoretic setting a well documented bias in social psychology, the fundamental attribution error. It is applied to a bargaining problem, thereby revealing a deceptive tactic that is hard to explain in the full rationality paradigm.

Date: 2010
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00701286v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Published in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2010, 2 (1), pp.1-20. ⟨10.1257/mic.2.1.1⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-00701286v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Theory of Deception (2010) Downloads
Working Paper: A Theory of Deception (2010) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00701286

DOI: 10.1257/mic.2.1.1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00701286