Achievable Rates for Information Extraction from a Strategic Sender

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the limits of information extraction in a strategic, non-cooperative setting where a sender may send untruthful signals, establishing the maximum achievable rates for reliable communication under these conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic framework for non-cooperative communication, deriving strategies for the receiver to achieve vanishing error probabilities and characterizing the maximum reliable communication rate.

Findings

Existence of strategies with vanishing error probability under certain sender utility conditions

For binary alphabets, the condition is necessary for reliable decoding

Maximum communication rate is strictly less than channel capacity in this setting

Abstract

We consider a setting of non-cooperative communication where a receiver wants to recover randomly generated sequences of symbols that are observed by a strategic sender. The sender aims to maximize an average utility that may not align with the recovery criterion of the receiver, whereby the signals it sends may not be truthful. The rate of communication is defined as the number of reconstructions corresponding to the sequences recovered correctly while communicating with the sender. We pose this problem as a sequential game between the sender and the receiver with the receiver as the leader and determine strategies for the receiver that attain vanishing probability of error and compute the rates of such strategies. We show the existence of such strategies under a condition on the utility of the sender. For the case of the binary alphabet, this condition is also necessary, in the absence of which, the probability of error goes to one for all choices of strategies of the receiver. We show that for reliable recovery, the receiver chooses to correctly decode only a $\textit{subset}$ of messages received from the sender and deliberately makes an error on messages outside this subset. Despite a clean channel, our setting exhibits a non-trivial $\textit{maximum}$ rate of communication, which is in general strictly less than the capacity of the channel. This implies the impossibility of strategies that correctly decode sequences of rate greater than the maximum rate while also achieving reliable communication. This is a key point of departure from the usual setting of cooperative communication.