Signaling Conventions: Who Learns What Where and When in a Social Network

Lewis (1969) invented signaling games to show that meaning convention can arise simply from regularities in communicative behavior. This paper contributes to the question how the formation of signaling conventions depends on the social structure of a population. Our results not only show that different language conventions can coexist, but also where to expect uniformity and language contact. We found that place and time of convention formation can be traced well to particular clusters of high/low values of suitable notions from formal network theory. Against prior expectations, we found that agent rationality is less important than network role in deciding how and when an agent adopts a convention.