Communication, risk, and efficiency in games

This paper uses curb sets to study the evolution of effective pre-play communication in games where a single communication round precedes a simultaneous-move, complete-information game. It is shown that the effectiveness of one-sided pre-play communication is inversely related to risk in the underlying game, and to the size of the message space. If messages have some a priori information content, then multi-sided communication is more effective than one-sided communication; i.e., risk and the size of the message space play no role. (C) 1998 Academic Press.