In game theory, cheap talk is communication between players which does not directly affect the payoffs of the game. This is in contrast to signaling in which sending certain messages may be costly for the sender depending on the state of the world. The classic example is of an expert (say, ecological) trying to explain the state of the world to an uninformed decision maker (say, politician voting on a deforestation bill). The decision maker, after hearing the report from the expert, must then make a decision which affects the payoffs of both players.
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Famous quotes containing the words cheap and/or talk:
“How cheap must be the material of which so many men are made!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)