The Game
There are two individuals, the signaler and the responder. The responder has some good which can be transferred to the signaler or not. If the responder keeps the good, the responder has a fitness of 1, otherwise the responder has a fitness of (1-d). The signaler can be in one of two states, healthy or needy. If the signaler receives the good, her fitness will be 1. Otherwise her fitness will be (1-b) or (1-a) if healthy or needy respectively (where a>b). The signaler can send a signal or not. If she sends the signal she incurs a cost of c regardless of the outcome.
If individuals maximize their own fitness the responder should never transfer the good, since he is reducing his own fitness for no gain. However, it supposed that the signaler and responder are related by some degree r. Each individual attempts to maximize her inclusive fitness, and so in some cases the responder would like to transfer the good.
The case of interest is where the responder only wants to transfer the good to the needy signaler, but the signaler would want the good regardless of her state. This creates a partial conflict of interest, where there would be an incentive for deception. Maynard Smith showed, however, that for certain values of c, honest signaling can be an evolutionarily stable strategy. This suggests that it might be sustained by evolution.
Read more about this topic: Sir Philip Sidney Game
Famous quotes containing the words the game and/or game:
“Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The family environment in which your children are growing up is different from that in which you grew up. The decisions our parents made and the strategies they used were developed in a different context from what we face today, even if the “content” of the problem is the same. It is a mistake to think that our own experience as children and adolescents will give us all we need to help our children. The rules of the game have changed.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“People’s affections can be as thin as paper; life is like a game of chess, changing with each move.”
—Chinese proverb.