Why evolution does not always lead to an optimal signaling system

This paper gives a complete characterization of neutrally stable strategies for sender–receiver games in the style of Lewis, or Nowak and Krakauer [Lewis, D., 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA; Nowak, M., Krakauer, D., 1999. The evolution of language. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 96, 8028–8033]. Due to the dynamic implications of neutral stability, the replicator dynamics of this model does not necessarily lead to the rise of an optimal signaling system, where every state of the world is bijectively linked to one signal and vice versa, but it can be trapped in suboptimum situations where two (or more) signals are used for the same event, or two (or more) events are associated with one and the same signal. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C72