s4h-game-theory-signaling

s4h-game-theory-signaling is a skill for Claude Code from human-avatar/skills-for-humanity. It costs 84 tokens per session (1,757 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to signalling, the study of how people prove hidden qualities or intentions when others cannot directly verify them. A credible signal is costly or difficult for someone making a false claim to copy.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to assess credentials, guarantees, commitments, demonstrations, and other ways to show that a claim is genuine.
Why use it?
It helps separate trustworthy evidence from cheap promises in situations with unequal information or low trust.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skills-for-humanity plugin — 197 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to assess credentials, guarantees, commitments, demonstrations, and other ways to show that a claim is genuine.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add human-avatar/skills-for-humanity --skill s4h-game-theory-signaling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills-for-humanity, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 197 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for s4h-game-theory-signaling

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for s4h-game-theory-signaling

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/human-avatar/skills-for-humanity/s4h-game-theory-signaling.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,757 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00084 $0.01757
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.00879
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00351
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00176

Measured 9d ago against content hash b081e51c9f66, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

s4h-game-theory-signaling scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/s4h-game-theory-signaling/SKILL.md · 121 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Game Theory: Signaling

Michael Spence's 1973 insight: education is not only valuable because it increases productivity — it is valuable as a signal because it is costly enough that low-ability workers won't bother acquiring it. If a credential is easy enough to fake, it conveys no information. The signal is credible only when it is cheaper for the type who actually has the quality being claimed.

The core principle: cheap talk cannot be credible in adversarial or asymmetric-information contexts. If saying "I'm trustworthy" costs nothing, then everyone — trustworthy or not — will say it, and the statement conveys nothing. The receiver knows this and discounts it. A credible signal must be costly in a way that is rational only if the claim is true. This is the separating condition: high types find the signal worth acquiring; low types don't.

George Akerlof's market for lemons (1970) shows the consequence when signaling fails: information asymmetry causes good products to be driven out by bad ones, because buyers can't distinguish them and price accordingly. Sellers of good products can't credibly signal their quality, so the market collapses toward low-quality goods and prices. Thomas Schelling extended this to commitment devices: any action that credibly binds you to a future course of action changes what others expect you to do — and thereby changes what they do now.


Your Process

Step 1: Information asymmetry Identify what one party knows that the other doesn't. Name the informed party and the uninformed party. What is the private information — quality, intent, ability, commitment, type? What would the uninformed party do if they had this information?

Framing check: Confirm the specific signaling situation before continuing. State the informed party, the uninformed party, and the private information being claimed in one sentence, then use AskUserQuestion:

  • Question: "I'm reading this as: [your one-sentence framing of the specific signaling situation — who is trying to credibly communicate what to whom]. Is that right?"
  • Header: "Framing"
  • Options:
    • Yes — proceed — framing is correct
    • Adjust — one element is off; user will correct it before you continue
    • Reframe — different situation than read; incorporate the correction before proceeding

Read the full file on GitHub · 121 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 121 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A b081e51c9f66

Subscribe to this mod's changes

s4h-game-theory-signaling is a skill published in the GitHub repository human-avatar/skills-for-humanity (223 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 1,757 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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