Questions of Trust

We consider the application of Game Theory in the modeling of different strategies of politeness. In particular, we examine how differences in the linguistic form of requests and proposals map onto the structure of the game being played by interlocutors. We show how considerations of social wants [1, 2] and coordination and cooperation motivate these differences. First, we adapt the notion of other-regarding preferences [3, 4] to show how linguistic systems with the ability to encode politeness strategies allow for requests and cooperation between a wider range of individuals. Finally, we connect the distinction between requests and proposals to the notion of a self-enforcing equilibrium [5].