The ESS in an Asymmetric Generalized War of Attrition with Mistakes in Role Perception

✍ Scribed by PATSY HACCOU; OLIVIER GLAIZOT

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2002
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 369 KB
• Volume: 214
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5193
• DOI: 10.1006/jtbi.2001.2454

✦ Synopsis

We derive the ESS for the generalized asymmetric war of attrition, where payo!s to contestants may vary in time and may depend on some characteristic, called the &&role'' of an individual. We use the same approach as Hammerstein & Parker (1982), who examined an asymmetric war of attrition. We consider two roles, A and B. Role A is assumed to be favoured with respect to payo!s. It is assumed that there is always a true asymmetry, so in each contest one individual has role A and the other has role B. It is assumed that roles are assigned to contestants at random and that they can make mistakes in role perception. It is shown that, under certain assumptions about shapes of payo! functions and probabilities of making mistakes, there is an ESS which can be characterized by two probability distributions with non-overlapping support. Individuals who perceive their role as A should choose larger persistence times. This ESS structure is similar to that in the asymmetric war of attrition. In that model, the resource values and the cost rates are constant. We consider situations where all these values may change in time and where rewards and costs may be equal after some "nite time. Such shapes of payo! functions arise naturally in competitive patch depletion (Sjerps & Haccou, 1994a, b). As a result, the probability density functions that specify the conditional strategies are no longer necessarily negative exponentials (as in the war of attrition), but may have very di!erent shapes. Furthermore, under some conditions there is a maximum persistence time, at which there can be an atom of probability. We give explicit expressions as well as numerical approximations for the ESS.