Signaling Games in Higher Dimensions: Geometric Properties of Equilibrium Solutions

Signaling game problems investigate communication scenarios where encoder(s) and decoder(s) have misaligned objectives due to the fact that they either employ different cost functions or have inconsistent priors. We investigate a signaling game problem where an encoder observes a multi-dimensional source and conveys a message to a decoder, and the quadratic objectives of the encoder and decoder are misaligned due to a bias vector. We first provide a set of geometry conditions that needs to be satisfied in equilibrium considering any multi-dimensional source. Then, we consider independent and identically distributed sources and completely characterize conditions under which an informative linear Nash equilibrium exists. In particular, we show that if the components of the bias vector are not equal in magnitude, then there exists a linear equilibrium if and only if the source distribution is Gaussian. On the other hand, for a linear equilibrium to exist in the case of equal bias components, it is required that the source density is symmetric around its mean. Moreover, in the case of Gaussian sources, our results have a rate-distortion theoretic implication that achievable rates and distortions in the considered game theoretic setup can be obtained from their team theoretic counterpart.