Risky speech: behavioral game theory and pragmatics

One traditional model of communication is the coordination game. Schelling’s original analysis of this game in 1960 emphasized the ideas of equilibrium, salience, common knowledge, and convention, all of which have had an impact on pragmatics. In the succeeding four decades, economists have discovered new regularities of behavior in coordination games, as multiple equilibria are distinguished by interactions among forward induction, payoff dominance, risk dominance, and sympathy. These game-theoretic factors, in turn, shed new light on such pragmatic phenomena as eavesdropping, relevance, irony, indirectness, euphemism, implication, and ishindenshin.