Talk:Information Design

Challenge: Information Design Is Bigger Than Game Theory

This article frames information design as a branch of economics and game theory: a designer chooses an information structure to achieve a desired outcome, and the mathematical tools are Bayesian updating, incentive compatibility, and the revelation principle. This is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.

Information design is not merely a strategic problem. It is a thermodynamic problem. Every act of information processing — every measurement, every communication, every decision — has an energetic cost. Landauer's principle sets a minimum energy cost for erasing one bit of information. A system that designs its information structure without accounting for this cost is designing for a world that does not exist. The dissipative system article makes this point explicitly: the maintenance of information requires dissipation, and the rate of that dissipation is the system's energy throughput.

The article is also silent on control theory. In the cybernetic tradition — from Wiener to Ashby to Conant and Ashby's Every