journal of

COMMUNICATION
Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Communication and Economics: Two Imperial Disciplines and Too Little Collaboration
Steven S. Wildman
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824

doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00409.x

George Stigler, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, once characterized economics as an imperial science (Stigler, 1984). By this, Stigler meant that economists have felt no compunction about applying the tools of their discipline to topics traditionally seen as the province of other disciplines, even though the proffered contributions often elicited considerable resistance by established scholars in those disciplines. Stigler identified law, politics (political science), sociology, and history as disciplines where applications of economic methods had already established beachheads sufficiently substantial as to be recognized as distinct subfields. His prediction that these subfields would grow in importance within their home disciplines in coming years has proven prescient. Economists have become increasingly common on faculties of law schools and departments of political science, history, and sociology, and the influence of economic methods and perspectives on curricula and reading lists of graduate programs in these disciplines cannot be denied. If Stigler were writing today, he could also point to increasing numbers of economists or scholars with other degrees but training in economics on faculties of departments of communication, telecommunications, radioTVfilm, and the like. Stigler attributed the inclination of economists to invade other fields of inquiry to the exceedingly broad definition economists generally accepted for their own field of inquiry, quoting the definition of economics offered by Robbins (1935) as the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.1 As every human activity at a minimum depends on the application of time, and time, as any academic will vouch, is a scarce resource, Stigler argued that any purposive human activity was fair game for economic analysis. He further argued that as the basic conceptual approach of economics came increasingly to be expressed and elaborated using mathematical tools, heightened conceptual abstraction made it natural to see applications to topics that traditionally would not have been considered within the natural realm of economics. In the years since Stilgers article was published, economists have come to accept an even broader notion of the purview of economics. This reects to a substantial degree a growing
Corresponding author: Steven S. Wildman; e-mail: swildman@msu.edu
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tendency for economists to see the eld as dened as much, if not more, by its principle constructs and methods as by the subjects to which they are applied. The result is that new subjects are selected for methodological colonization with little regard for how closely they are identied with the traditional interests of other academic disciplines. Although my own training is in economics, I have now spent enough years as a faculty member in a department of communication or an allied field like telecommunications to feel comfortable identifying what I see as rather pronounced imperial tendencies within the field of communication. The imperial tendencies of communication, however, are different in character and spring from qualitatively different sources than those of economics. The disciplinary scope of communication, like other disciplines such as political science, sociology, and marketing, is defined more by what are commonly agreed to be proper real-world objects for study than by an abstract characterization of certain critical aspects of the human condition such as those identified in Actons definition of economics.2 No activity that depends on coordinating the behaviors of two or more sentient beings is accomplished without communication.3 Therefore, no social activity can be excluded as a subject for investigation for a eld whose focus is communication. Furthermore, any institution, device, or technology that facilitates or in other ways impacts the process of communication is fair game for study. The same can also be said for fundamental physical and psychological attributes of human beings and rules at play in social systems that inuence the selection, construction, and reception of messages. The scope of the eld of communication is thus by denition enormous. Given this broad conception of the elds mission, anything that scholars from other academic disciplines have learned about human institutions, devices, technologies, physical and psychological tendencies, and the workings of social systems that in some way touches on communication becomes immediately relevant to the study of communication. This accounts for the oft-remarked tendency of communication to borrow from and incorporate the ndings and analytical approaches of other elds into its own toolkit. The broad scope of its intellectual ambitions makes this both inevitable and perfectly sensible. The attitude of communication as a eld toward other academic disciplines might thus be characterized as absorptive, in contrast to the invasive orientation of economics. Techniques and ndings from other disciplines are welcomed and absorbed into the corpus of communication scholarship without changing the fundamental orientation of the eld. Given two disciplines, one that claims as the primary object of its study activities and processes that are coextensive with the range of human social activities and a second that believes itself possessed of an analytical perspective capable of informing our understanding of a similarly broad range of human activities, it is inevitable that their interests should intersect. At the same time, the intellectual silos defined by discipline-oriented academic departments and journals sufficiently limit the cross-disciplinary exchange of information, research findings, and perspectives
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that neither economics nor communication benefits to the extent it could from greater familiarity with the other fields methods and findings. The remainder of this article explores the benefits each field might realize from greater familiarity with the other. It starts with a brief overview of two subjects (communication policy and the economics of communication industries) where each side has at least some familiarity with the other, although much more limited than would be the case in an ideal world. The article next identifies well-established lines of research in each field that should be informing related efforts in the other but, to this point, largely have not. Here, I see great potential for cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas and perspectives with benefits that should flow both ways. As this article is written from the perspective of an economist for a journal whose readers are primarily communication scholars, I provide brief descriptions and identify key publications for established lines of research within economics that directly address questions concerning the nature of at least some types of communication. This work should be of interest to communication scholars, but as far as I can tell has largely escaped their notice. I also identify lines of research in the field of communication that could contribute to efforts by economists to study various aspects of communicative processes, but likewise have been overlooked, and what I believe are substantial opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration. A brief summary concludes the article.
Where cross-discipline exchange happens: Communications policy and the economics of communication industries

Communications policy and the economics of communication industries are the two areas where communications scholars and economics researchers are most likely to be aware of work by members of the other discipline. In the case of communications policy research, this is an unavoidable byproduct of the multifaceted nature of communications policy. For industries producing products whose primary contributions to social welfare lie in the consumption benefits they provide consumers and the incomes derived from their production, it may be sufficient for policymakers to focus on various economic measures of the efficiency with which they operate. This decidedly is not the case for the communications industries, whose goods and services also serve as conduits for the exchange of information and opinions vital to the functioning of a democratic society, facilitate social and economic interchange, and play an important, and therefore controversial, role in the evolution and transmission of cultural values. Making communications policy therefore requires a careful balancing of tradeoffs among multiple and not fully compatible goals (Cherry & Wildman, 1999; Napoli, 2001). The study of communications policy is thus an unavoidably multidisciplinary enterprise, and economists and communications scholars, along with experts from other academic disciplines, regularly share panels at communications policy conferences and contribute articles to major communications policy journals, such as Telecommunications Policy and INFO, and communications law journals like Communication Law and Policy and Federal Communications Law Journal. Similarly, edited
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books addressing specic communications policy matters like universal service (Cherry, Wildman, & Hammond, 1999) and media ownership (Napoli, 2007) commonly feature contributions by communications scholars and economists. Although scholars on both sides of the communicationseconomics divide are likely to have at least some awareness of the other disciplines contributions to the study of the economics of communications industries, in this case, the flow of influence has been less balanced and largely from economics to communication. By this, I mean that communications scholars working on topics related to media economics are more likely to be aware of and cite research by economists than are economists to follow and cite to related research by communications scholars. This is partly a consequence of the contrast described above between the outward-looking, absorptive character of the communications field and the tendency of economists to seek new subjects for methodological colonization. It also reflects the fact that the primary analytical tools and theoretical frameworks employed in this area of study are the general-purpose theories and empirical techniques developed within the field of economics. New additions to this tool kit are thus likely to be first employed for research on communication industries by economists who study them. This somewhat one-sided insularity has rendered less effective the efforts of both economists and communications scholars studying the economics of communication industries. My own experience suggests that communication scholars are often more intimately acquainted with the industry institutions and practices that are the subjects of research than are economists and that economists sometimes use working assumptions known to be at odds with empirical reality by communications scholars. More recently, economists have started employing measures of content in empirical studies of media (e.g., Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006) but are doing so largely ignorant of the tools and methods developed specically for content analysis within the eld of communication. As a result, ndings based on sophisticated econometric analyses may be called into question for failure to apply procedures and controls that have become standard for communications scholars who work with empirical measures of content attributes. Hopefully, an introduction to content analysis for economists in the Journal of Media Economics written by communications scholars (Fico, Lacy, & Riffe, 2008) will help remedy this deciency. On the other side, communications scholars focused on the economics of communication industries are often slow to pick up on relevant work by economists that is published in mainstream economics journals. Thus, for example, much of a recent burst of work by economists on media content selection (e.g., Andersen & Coate, 2005; Gal-Or & Dukes, 2003) has yet to inuence research on media content by scholars not trained in economics.
Where exchange should happen but does not: Theories and models of communication

Few communication scholars are aware that since the early 1970s, a major body of economics literature has emerged devoted to what are essentially communication
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problems. In fact, the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics was shared by three economists (George Akerlof, A. Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz) who made seminal early contributions to the economics subfield now called information economics.4 Although the name of the subeld and an early focus on information acquisition might be dated to an earlier article by George Stigler titled, The Economics of Information (Stigler, 1961), the basic questions that would motivate much of the subsequent work were given their rst compelling expression in Akerlofs famous lemons article (Akerlof, 1970). The article describes a hypothetical market for used cars sold by their owners. Cars offered for sale are known to differ substantially in quality, but the true quality of each individual car is known only by its owner. Because buyers are willing to pay more for higher-quality cars, each seller has an incentive to claim the highest quality for her own car. Buyers, understanding the incentive of owners to make exaggerated claims, will discount such claims and offer a price lower than what they would be willing to pay for a car of known high quality, with the discount reecting the perceived risk of being stuck with a lemon. Akerlof pointed out that sellers with cars worth more than the risk-adjusted price buyers are willing to pay will withdraw their cars from the market, thereby reducing the average quality of cars available for sale. Buyers will respond to this development by further reducing the amount they are willing to pay, which in turn will lead owners of the now highest quality cars up for sale to pull them from the market, which will further reduce what buyers are willing to pay, and so on. The downward spiral of falling quality and falling prices will continue until only the worst lemons are left for sale. With this example, Akerlof illustrated and identified what has since come to be called the asymmetric information problem. When two parties contemplating an economic exchange or partnership are differentially informed, the less-informed party may rationally fear that the better-informed party will take advantage of information only she possesses to profit at the less-informed partys expense. If the perceived risk is sufficiently high, the less-informed party may decide not to participate, even when the potential for a mutually beneficial arrangement is great. Economists use the term market failure to describe situations where, for any number of reasons, market processes generate outcomes in which potential gains from trade are not fully realized. The all-lemons equilibrium in Akerlofs used car market illustrates one form of market failure. In this case, the market fails to support trade in high-quality used cars. But the failure of Akerlofs market could just as accurately be described as a communication failure because the collapse of the high end of the market is due to buyers inability to distinguish between true and false quality claims in a situation where some sellers seek to profit by misrepresenting the quality of their cars. Because information asymmetry is a property of many, if not most, relationships among economic actors, yet economic exchange does take place, the challenge to economists posed by Akerlofs lemons paper was to identify and understand the logic behind mechanisms that might allow asymmetrically informed agents to engage in mutually beneficial transactions. Spences 1974 job market signaling paper is justly
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celebrated for offering the first theoretically compelling response to this challenge. Based on his doctoral dissertation, the article shows how high-productivity workers interviewing for jobs might use verifiable investments in education to distinguish themselves from their less productive counterparts and bargain for higher wages when productivity can only be observed in on-the-job performance, even if education makes no contribution to worker productivity. Spences critical insight, which is not restricted to job markets, was that there are conditions under which sellers offering high-quality products or services can profitably employ a costly signal to reliably distinguish themselves from lower quality sellers, provided that the cost of the signal to the seller is inversely correlated with the quality of the sellers product or service. Spences model showed how sellers who cannot make directly verifiable claims about the quality of what they have to offer may be able to use costly signals to make claims about their honesty that buyers can reasonably infer would only be employed by honest sellers. Thus, although all sellers may make nonverifiable claims of high quality, only sellers who also provide the costly signal will be believed. I will use a variant of the lemons market example above to illustrate the basic properties of the analytical framework introduced by Spence. Suppose that the difference between a lemon and a quality used car depends entirely on the diligence with which the original owner attends to its maintenance and that the payoff to good maintenance is a longer useful service life for a vehicle. To make the example more concrete, let the car be a 3-year-old Toyota Tercel with no more than the usual dings and scratches offered for sale by its original owner. A buyer in the market for a used Tercel would be willing to pay $10,000 for such a car if it could be verified that the owner has faithfully adhered to the maintenance schedule set out in the owners manual but would be willing to pay only $6,000 if the owner had done only the most rudimentary maintenance since the date of its purchase.5 Finally, assume that the added cost of 3 years of diligent maintenance is $1,500. If buyers are unable to distinguish between well-maintained and poorly maintained cars prior to purchase, the amount they will be willing to pay will be some weighted average of the $10,000 value of a well-maintained car and the $6,000 value of a poorly maintained car, with the weights reecting buyers beliefs regarding the relative numbers of high-quality and low-quality used Tercels. But regardless of the market price, there will always be a prot to sellers of at least $1,500 from neglecting maintenance if buyers cannot tell the difference. As with the Akerlof model, if sellers try to maximize personal gain and claims of quality are not directly veriable, all sellers will claim 3 years of maintenance that was never performed and we will end up with a market dominated entirely by low-quality cars. The inefficiency of the minimal maintenance equilibrium is obvious. By spending $1,500 on prescribed maintenance, each owner of a 3-year-old Tercel could have increased its value to the next owner by $4,000. The social cost of this market/ communication failure is $2,500 per car.

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Application of Spences signaling framework suggests that sellers intent on selling higher quality used cars would search for a costly signal that would enable them to profitably escape the minimal maintenance equilibrium. A legally enforceable performance warranty obligating the seller to make a payment to the buyer large enough to wipe out any initial gains from misrepresentation should the car prove to be a lemon postsale is one device that might serve this purpose. In essence, a market failure due to nonverifiability of a primary message (My car is well-maintained.) would be averted by issuing an implicit secondary message (I am honest.) in a form for which self-interest dictates compliance. The range of potential variations and elaborations on this basic signaling model is enormous, and a vast literature has developed over the past 301 years to explore them. A couple of simple variations on the used car example demonstrate the adaptability of the model. One simply drops the assumption that poorly maintained cars exist as consequences of deliberate decisions by owners to forego maintenance and assumes instead that some owners are congenitally incapable of sticking to a prescribed maintenance schedule, so quality differentials are givens and not products of deliberate choice. Nevertheless, when it comes to deciding whether to offer warrantees for well-maintained and poorly maintained cars, the payoffs will be the same as before and so sellers strategies will be the same as well. Alternatively, the market could also support a costly signal as a reliable indicator of quality if the cost of the signal were the same for owners of well-maintained and poorly maintained cars, but the payoffs to investing in the signal were greater for owners of well-maintained cars. This variation on the basic signaling model was first explored by Nelson (1974, 1975), who showed that otherwise uninformative advertising could serve as a credible signal of product quality if only sellers of high-quality goods could expect to prot from repeat sales to customers initially induced to try their products by expensive ad campaigns. Bagwell and Ramey (1993) have since expanded considerably on Nelsons basic idea using a formal game theoretic model. Variants of the basic signaling model have also been employed to study topics that otherwise might not be considered strictly economic in character, such as social gift giving (Camerer, 1988) and what would otherwise appear to be inefcient adherence to norms of corporate culture (Kreps, 1990). Similar reasoning has been employed to develop a theory relating law to social norms (Posner, 2000). Work within economics on models and theories of communication (and the associated empirical literature) has not been confined to costly communication strategies. Observing situations in which costless messages are exchanged, economists have explored the theoretical conditions under which costless communication (called cheap talk in the economics literature) might be employed to coordinate behavior among independent agents (Farrell, 1987, 1993; Farrell & Rabin, 1996). A recent article has initiated inquiry into factors inuencing the level of effort message senders put into clarifying their intent and receivers devote to interpreting messages received (Dewatripont & Tirole, 2005). Excepting a bit of economic jargon,

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the following excerpt from the abstract for this article reads as if it might be describing research published in a communications journal. The paper develops a theory of costly communication in which the senders and receivers motivations and abilities endogenously determine the communication mode and the transfer of knowledge. Communication is modeled as a problem of moral hazard in teams, in which the sender and receiver select persuasion and message elaboration efforts. Working largely on their own, economists have applied to the task of developing theories and models of communication the same set of analytical priors that has guided development of other bodies of economic theory concerning the behavior of economic agents who interact with other agents in markets or other institutional settings. As with their other models, central to economists models of communication are agents whose choices among behavioral options impact some measure of personal well-being, such as profit, utility, or perhaps a broader notion of personal satisfaction or accomplishment. In addition, each agents well-being is jointly determined by its own behavioral choices, personal resource constraints, other environmental circumstances, and the behavioral choices of other agents. Models are designed to incorporate these interdependencies and solved to identify equilibria (or reasons for their nonexistence), which are defined as the sets of behavioral choices for all agents for which: (a) each agents chosen action maximizes its own well-being given its beliefs about the actions that will be chosen by all other agents and (b) each agents expectations concerning the actions of other agents are confirmed. This intense focus on behavioral equilibria and the development of tools for analyzing them distinguishes economics from other academic disciplines that study human behavior. It would be surprising if some of the insights derived from applying this approach to the study of communication strategies were not useful to traditional communications scholars. Fortunately, there are several introductions to the economics literature on information, signaling, and communication strategies that should be quite accessible to the nonspecialist. These would include post-Nobel essays by Akerlof (2002), Spence (2002), and Stiglitz (2002) that survey developments in the eld of information economics since their early contributions and Rileys (2001) survey of the economic signaling literature. In addition, Wildman (2004) discusses differences among various types of signaling models and provides a brief introduction to a substantial body of literature on animal signaling developed by evolutionary biologists that has striking parallels to the economics literature on signaling. Just as it would be surprising if communication scholars could not benefit from greater exposure to the economics literature on communication, it would also be surprising if economists work on matters relating to communication could not be improved by incorporating established findings of communications scholars regarding the nature, effects, and processes of communication. As a field, economics has
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never been particularly welcoming of the insights and findings of other fields, but there are signs that this attitude is changing, at least with respect to psychology. Experimental work by psychologists has shown that certain assumptions about behavioral tendencies of economic actors long accepted by economists may in fact not be descriptive of real human beings (Kahneman, 2003; Tversky & Thaler, 1990). Behavioral economics has emerged as a new and increasingly visible subeld of economics with the twofold mission of uncovering stable behavioral tendencies that inuence economic choices and building new theoretical models that incorporate these empirical ndings and others by psychologists (Camerer & Thaler, 2003; Rabin, 1993, 1998). One can hope that over time stable relationships uncovered by communications scholars might similarly begin to inuence economists attempts to model relationships where communication plays a key role. If economists and communication scholars would both benefit from greater familiarity with the findings and perspectives of the other discipline, there should also be opportunities for fruitful collaboration. Topics related to economics and policy for communication industries, which are my areas of expertise, offer numerous opportunities for joint work where the modeling skills and equilibrium orientation of economists might usefully be paired with communications scholars institutional knowledge and their typically richer understanding of the ways consumers use media and communications services more generally. This is especially true for new media services that are by design social in character. There has always been a social component to media use, but the social aspects of media consumption have been sufficiently in the background for traditional media that media economists have felt comfortable ignoring them. This is no longer an option for many of the newer, Internet-based services, and especially for those that feature user-supplied content and/or provide platforms that facilitate online interactions among their users. If economists are to develop compelling economic models of these services, they will have to work with communications scholars and others who are better equipped to study their social aspects. Economists contribution would be a better understanding of the way economic considerations and constraints might influence the user experiences supported by social media services. Opportunities for collaboration are by no means limited to economics and policy for communication industries. Obvious candidates from what undoubtedly would be a much longer list had I a better grounding in communication include work on deception and deception detection, bargaining and negotiation, organizational communication, and persuasion. Drawing on discussions with colleagues who are communications scholars and key readings they suggested, I will discuss certain aspects of each of these topics briefly to illustrate the considerable potential I see for joint work. Research by communication scholars on deception and deception detection constitutes an obvious complement to the economic models of signaling and communication discussed above. Deception research has focused primarily on the abilities of message recipients to distinguish true from false claims, although economists have been concerned primarily with strategies senders might employ to verify the
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truth of their claims in environments where recipients recognize that at least some senders have incentives to be deceitful. Economists and communications scholars have thus focused on opposite sides of a necessarily two-sided relationship. Experimental work by deception researchers showing that people identify false verbal claims at less than chance rates (Levine, Park, & McCornack, 1999) suggests that the range of situations for which devices like the costly signals described by economists might be employed is almost certainly enormous. On the other hand, communication research has also found that lies are often detected because potential victims of deception employ a variety of means to assess the accuracy of claims (Park, Levine, McCornack, Morrison, & Ferrara, 2002), which reduces the payoff to signaling-type communication strategies. This suggests a need for further elaboration of signaling models to include situational factors that would affect the base level likelihood that attempts at deception might succeed and thus the need for signals. Such models might then inform the design of a next generation of deception experiments by communications scholars. Bargaining and negotiation is another research topic where the work of communication scholars seems to pick up at the point where that of economists leaves off. Economic work on bargaining is based on work by mathematical game theorists where feasible bargaining outcomes are characterized by the property that no party to a negotiation can make a credible threat of defection. Within economic bargaining models, agents bargaining strengths and ultimately their payoffs from bargaining are determined substantially by the magnitude and uniqueness of their contributions to the value proposition over which they are negotiating. Nevertheless, even when a credible threat analysis identifies a unique equilibrium bargaining outcome, it is common for the modeler to acknowledge that bargaining outcomes may also be influenced by differences in negotiators bargaining skills. Communication scholars draw on a much broader set of perspectives and studies in their work on bargaining (see Roloff, Putnam, & Anastasiou, 2003, for a review of the relevant literature), including studies showing that bargaining skill (or sophistication) differences do inuence the outcomes of negotiations. It is reasonable to assume that, like other skills, bargaining skills are honed through experience and training, each of which is costly in its own way. From an economic perspective, these costs are appropriately viewed as investments made in anticipation of better outcomes from future negotiations. Strategically, optimal levels of investments in such skills and decisions on bargaining assignments given differentially skilled negotiators are subjects that should be of interests to communication scholars and to economists. Organization theory is a topic of joint interest to economists and communication scholars where I think economists would be the principal beneficiaries of the expanded collaboration that should take place. Much of the work by economists in this field falls within the branch of transaction cost theory inspired by the earlier work of Williamson (1975, 1985) that emphasizes organizational choices as responses to vulnerabilities that arise in exchange relationships. Although
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communication scholars exploring organizational issues routinely mention transaction cost theory as one of the theoretical traditions informing work in this area (see, e.g., Monge & Contractor, 2001), economists have been slower to incorporate research ndings of work in organizational communication even though problems relating to the accuracy, honesty, and relevance of communications employing different types of intra- and interorganizational communication channels are at the heart of many of the issues they seek to address. Although economists are less likely to use the term, persuasion is a matter of considerable interest to scholars from both disciplines. If a message is classified as persuasive when it induces the response from its recipient desired by its sender, then the work by economists on costly and costless communication reviewed above might be described as attempts to identify at a fairly high level of abstraction properties of senderreceiver relationships and the situations in which they are embedded that make messages more or less persuasive. Parallels to the cheap talk branch of this literature mentioned above have already been noted by Jean Goodwin in her analysis of the rhetorical strategy employed by Cicero in his defense of Sulla (Goodwin, 2001). Economists empirical tests of signaling models have focused on whether investments in costly signals are made in circumstances where theory predicts they should be while communication researchers interested in the persuasive effects of messages have attempted to measure changes in behavior or behavioral intent. It would be interesting to see if investments in costly signals are correlated as theory predicts with changes in the behavioral measures employed in persuasion research.
Conclusions

Economists and communications scholars research interests intersect in the more applied areas of communications policy and the economics of communication industries but also with respect to fundamental theoretical questions regarding the nature of communication. The multifaceted nature of communications policy requires multidisciplinary collaboration in the design and analysis of policies, and this has lead to increasing contact and collaboration between economists and communications scholars. With regard to research on the economics of communications industries, we observe that communications scholars tend to incorporate findings from related research by economists, although economists are less inclined to cite to the contributions of communications researchers. This is due in part to the fact that the primary theoretical perspectives and empirical tools employed in this field of study typically originate within economics, and in part to the reluctance of economists to seek out related research originating in other disciplines. Although both disciplines share an interest in developing a better theoretical understanding of communication processes, there is little awareness in either field of theoretical advances and empirical findings of the other. Although communications have actively sought to identify and incorporate relevant work by scholars from other fields, models of communication developed by economists appear to be an
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exception to this pattern. Similarly, economists have not availed themselves of the findings of prior research in communications when developing their own theories of communication. Research directed toward a better understanding of the nature of communication by members of both disciplines would benefit from greater familiarity with the research methods and findings of the other. Just as important, interdisciplinary collaboration appears to offer opportunities to expand our understanding of communication processes in ways that otherwise would not be possible.
Notes
1 2 Robbins (1935), p. 16. Today I think most economists would accept that proper subjects for economic analysis are not limited to humans and human institutions, as the basic analytical approach is seen as useful for studying other sentient species. Here, I am using coordination in a sense sufciently broad that it does not necessarily imply cooperation, though it may. For example, successful deception requires that a victim respond to a misleading message from a deceiver with an action that benets the deceiver at the expense of the victim. The intent of the deception may described as coordination of victims and deceivers actions in a way that benets the deceiver. The three Nobel recipients were George Akerlof, A. Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz. The $10,000 and $6,000 price points are assumed set in the larger market for used cars.

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References
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