The Force of Innovation: Emergence and Extinction of Messages in Signaling Games

Abstract. Lewis [L1] invented signaling games to show that meaning convention can arise simply from regularities in communicative behav-ior. The precondition for the emergence of such conventions are so-called perfect signaling systems. In a series of articles the emergence of such sig-naling systems was addressed by combining signaling games with learning dynamics; and not uncommonly researchers examined the circumstances aggravating the emergence of perfect signaling. It could be shown that especially by increasing the number of states, messages and actions for a signaling game perfect signaling becomes more and more improbable. This paper contributes to the question how the capability of innovation through emergence of new messages and extinction of unused messages would change these outcomes. Our results show that innovation in fact supports the emergence of perfect signaling.