Modelling Dominance Hierarchy formation as a Multi-player game

✍ Scribed by M. BROOM; C. CANNINGS

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 257 KB
• Volume: 219
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5193
• DOI: 10.1006/jtbi.2002.3137

✦ Synopsis

Animals who live in groups need to divide available resources amongst themselves. This is often achieved by means of a dominance hierarchy, where dominant individuals obtain a larger share of the resources than subordinate individuals. This paper introduces a model of dominance hierarchy formation using a multi-player extension of the classical Hawk-Dove game. Animals play non-independent pairwise games in a Swiss tournament which pairs opponents against those which have performed equally well in the conflict so far, for a fixed number of rounds. Resources are divided according to the number of contests won. The model, and its emergent properties, are discussed in the context of experimental observations.