Copyright
Georg WeizsäckerPublished On
2023-11-07Page Range
pp. 9–16Language
- English
Print Length
8 pages
2. Having a conversation
- Georg Weizsäcker (author)
Chapter of: Misunderstandings: False Beliefs in Communication(pp. 9–16)
Chapter 2 introduces the assumptions that underlie the book’s analysis. Two interlocutors, a talker and a listener, carry out a simple conversation where the talker says something and the listener reacts. The chapter formulates the conversation, and its surrounding circumstances, as an abstract two-player interactive game where each player maximizes his or her subjective expected utility. This formulation allows the conversation to be suitably described by the beliefs that justify the chosen actions and statements. For illustrations, the chapter discusses how each of the three running examples may be simplified so that it fits the abstract discussion.
Contributors
Georg Weizsäcker
(author)Professor of Economics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Georg Weizsäcker is a behavioral economist. He obtained his PhD in Business Economics at Harvard University, has taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science and at University College London, and is now Professor of Economics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research lies in the areas of experimental economics, decision theory and applied microeconomics, with numerous contributions on the understanding and interpretations of other people's statements and choices. He is a Fellow of the European Economic Association, was appointed to numerous scientific committees and boards, and currently serves as the spokesperson of a research center on applied behavioral economics that is funded by the German Research Foundation.