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3 - Models of group or multi-party contests

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2013

By
Tom N. Sherratt  and
Mike Mesterton-Gibbons
Edited by
Ian C. W. Hardy  and
Mark Briffa
Ian C. W. Hardy
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
Mark Briffa
Affiliation:
University of Plymouth
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Summary

Summary

Animal conflict typically manifests itself as an aggressive interaction between two individuals, but the nature of this interaction can sometimes be influenced by third parties. For example, in some systems, individuals can observe fights between others and use the information they gain to help shape their own fighting strategies. Fighters themselves can modify their own behaviour dependent on whether an audience is present, and winners of fights sometimes display their victory to bystanders. In other systems, fights are genuinely polyadic and coalitions can form, with two or more individuals forming an alliance to protect or obtain a valuable resource. These coalitions often involve two individuals fighting one individual but sometimes contests more akin to warfare can take place between two large groups of individuals. Ecological interactions are shaped by natural selection and frequently involve cases in which the payoff from adopting any given behavioural strategy is dependent on the strategies adopted by other members of the population. So games, mathematical models of strategic interaction, are potentially a powerful tool to represent and analyse many of the multi-party contests described above. In this chapter we briefly review examples of multi-party contests in nature before going on to describe how and why such contests have been represented mathematically and the types of insight these models have delivered. Conflicts that take place within large networks are, almost by definition, complex affairs, but here we show that the representation of multi-party contests as triadic interactions can go some way to explaining a variety of phenomena ranging from victory displays to neighbour intervention and that these models can provide benchmarks for the exploration of more complex systems. Finally, we briefly review where this modelling work may lead, and identify some challenges that lie ahead.

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Animal Contests , pp. 33 - 46
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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