Capturing Misalignment

TL;DR

This paper formalizes the concept of misalignment in interactive environments, highlighting its divergence from standard belief models and exploring its implications for reasoning and speculative trade.

Contribution

It introduces agent-dependent type structures to capture misalignment, addressing limitations of traditional frameworks and analyzing its effects on interactive reasoning.

Findings

Misalignment can be characterized by non-belief-closed state spaces.

Agent-dependent type structures effectively model varying degrees of misalignment.

Misalignment can lead to speculative trade even under restrictive assumptions.

Abstract

We introduce and formalize misalignment, a phenomenon of interactive environments perceived from an analyst's perspective where an agent holds beliefs about another agent's beliefs that do not correspond to the actual beliefs of the latter. We demonstrate that standard frameworks, such as type structures, fail to capture misalignment, necessitating new tools to analyze this phenomenon. To this end, we characterize misalignment through non-belief-closed state spaces and introduce agent-dependent type structures, which provide a flexible tool to understand the varying degrees of misalignment. Furthermore, we establish that appropriately adapted modal operators on agent-dependent type structures behave consistently with standard properties, enabling us to explore the implications of misalignment for interactive reasoning. Finally, we show how speculative trade can arise under misalignment, even when imposing the corresponding assumptions that rule out such trades in standard environments.