The appropriateness of empathy in AI has emerged as a critical concern, as excessive empathy risks seeming manipulative while insufficient empathy appears dismissive. While prior research has explored how to quantify empathy in AI, few studies examine whether such empathy is contextually appropriate. This paper introduces an economic perspective by applying signaling theory to human-AI conversations. We propose Signal Cost Proxies (emotional richness, perspective-taking, and contextual tailoring) mapped to affective, cognitive, and associative empathy. This multidimensional framework enables systematic evaluation of empathy not just by presence, but by its appropriateness relative to user demand.

翻译：AI中同理心的适当性已成为关键问题，过度同理心可能显得具有操纵性，而不足则显得冷漠。尽管先前研究探索了如何量化AI中的同理心，但很少有研究检验这种同理心在情境中是否恰当。本文通过将信号理论应用于人机对话，引入经济学视角。我们提出情感丰富性、观点采样和情境定制三大信号成本代理指标，分别对应情感、认知和联想同理心。这一多维度框架不仅依据存在性，更依据相对于用户需求的适当性，对同理心进行系统评估。