Figure 2.

Imprecision increases signaling costs in conventional signaling systems. Upper black curve, benefit to signaler of being perceived as quality x; lower gray curves, cost of signaling quality x to signalers of low quality (light gray), medium quality (gray), and high quality (dark gray); dashed lines, equilibrium signals. (A) No perceptual error. Receivers punish signalers who signal above true quality, generating kinked cost functions. If receivers make no mistakes, signalers will signal their true qualities and equilibrium signal costs will be zero. (B) Perceptual error (here, normally distributed with μ = 0, σ = 0.2) “rounds out” the kinked cost functions, as receivers sometimes mistakenly punish honest signalers. This event decreases the curvature of the signal-cost function and raises equilibrium signal costs (shown as black bars).