Collaborative Research: Dynamic Perspectives on Costs and Conflict in Signaling Interactions

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Signaling is a very basic biological phenomenon. It is present at almost all levels of biological organization and it plays a crucial role in nearly all biological processes. Although these processes comprise a very diverse set of phenomena, there is a common core to their structure: at least one sender interacts with at least one receiver. This allows one to apply the mathematical theory of games, which is an abstract theory of strategic interactions. The goal of this project is to identify stable evolutionary outcomes of signaling interactions by using methods from evolutionary game theory. Although some properties of signaling are well understood, our knowledge of how reliable signaling emerges in a dynamic process is limited, especially in cases where there is substantial conflict of interest between a sender and a receiver. If it is not in the sender's interest to transfer all relevant information, how can reliable signaling be achieved? This question is at the heart of a huge number of problems in biology. It also plays a very prominent role in many economic interactions. This project will provide important new results for a wide array of research programs and will open up unknown paths for experiments and field studies. The project involves the training of undergraduate and graduate students and the development of educational tools.