ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most well-known examples of animal conflict involve competition between male animals over access to mates. We can think of aggressive contests such as those in stags (see Chapter 4) or elephant seals (McCann, 1981) or complicated ritual displays such as in the dances of cranes (Panov et al. 2010). The classical model of this type of behaviour is the Hawk-Dove game (see Section 4.1). This is a simple game aimed at emphasizing important features of evolutionary games, rather than being an exact model of any particular situation. These features include the existence of strategies of restraint when maximum violence is not used even when individuals compete for very valuable resources and the possibility of stable mixed strategy solutions. However, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, it has been developed in a number of ways to more realistically model behaviour, and we look at one such model below.
