Game Theory and Food Sharing between Animals
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/23/5/977/232579
The above article talks about the strategies that animals adopt in order to survive in the real world. It specifically talks about how animals may steal food from others. When this happens, the animal that feels threatened may choose to defend or share the food with the challenger, or just retreat and leave the food to the challenger. When it comes to dividing the food, there are two scenarios. Either the food can be divided between the animals or the food cannot be divided between the animals. The article bases its game theory approach off of the assumption that limited food sharing occurs. The original game theory model for this scenario is known as the producer-scrounger model where animals get food using two strategies – search for food (producer’s strategy) or steal food from other animals (scrounger’s strategy). A stable equilibrium for the two strategies may exist when the frequencies of the two result in the two strategies having an equal payoff.
They believe this model will be an improvement from previous models if caught food items are partly divisible such as fruits compared to food items that are indivisible such as nuts. In the situation where food comes in batches then the producer-scrounger model described above would be an appropriate model. The model in the article predicts that the optimal strategy is attempting to share or steal the food whenever you can and sharing the food if attacked. The nonaggressive strategy of not challenging other animals and sharing their food when challenged is not an optimal strategy.
The article connects to how we talked about the Hawk-Dove game in lecture which is another game theory model for investigating the food sharing behavior in animals in a nonaggressive setting. In this game, there is only one contest considered, the Hawk and the Dove strategy. If one animal decides to play the Hawk strategy against another animal that also plays the Hawk strategy, the reward for them will either be equal or lower than if they play the Dove strategy. If we look at a competition between a Hawk and a Dove, the Hawk will always receive the higher payoff. The article also takes a look at optimal strategies for animals in various ecological settings which relates to the topic of Dominant Strategies discussed in class.