Pervasive Signaling

Abstract

We ask how the increasing publicness of peoples' decisions (due, for example, to social media and other aspects of the internet) affects the total costs they incur as a result of signaling distortions. While pervasive signaling may induce pervasive distortions, it may also permit people to signal successfully while distorting each choice to a smaller degree; hence, the overall impact on signaling costs is unclear. We show that, ironically, for a broad class of environments, a sufficient increase in the number of signaling opportunities allows senders to "live authentically" - i.e., to signal their
types at arbitrarily low overall cost.