title: Role asymmetry and code transmission in signaling games: an experimental and computational investigation.
abstract: In signaling games, a sender has private access to a state of affairs and uses a signal to inform a receiver about that state. If no common association of signals and states is initially available, sender and receiver must coordinate to develop one. How do players divide coordination labor? We show experimentally that, if players switch roles at each communication round, coordination labor is shared. However, in games with fixed roles, coordination labor is divided: Receivers adjust their mappings more frequently, whereas senders maintain the initial code, which is transmitted to receivers and becomes the common code. In a series of computer simulations, player and role asymmetry as observed experimentally were accounted for by a model in which the receiver in the first signaling round has a higher chance of adjusting its code than its partner. From this basic division of labor among players, certain properties of role asymmetry, in particular correlations with game complexity, are seen to follow.
authors.affiliation: Brain and Language Laboratory, Neuroscience Area, SISSA International School for Advanced Studies.
authors.forename: Maggie
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Moreno
authors.affiliation: Brain and Language Laboratory, Neuroscience Area, SISSA International School for Advanced Studies.|Language Acquisition and Language Processing Lab, Department of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
authors.forename: Giosuè
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Baggio
mesh_terms: D003142:Communication; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005260:Female; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012380:Role; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Communication; Coordination games; Semantics; Signaling games