Abstract
This paper proposes a model to explain the potential role of inter-group conflicts in determining the rise and fall of signaling norms. Individuals in a population are characterized by high and low productivity types and they are matched in pairs to form social relationships such as mating or foraging relationships. In each relationship, an individual’s payoff is increasing in its own type and its partner’s type. Hence, the payoff structure of a relationship does not resemble a dilemma situation. Assume that types are not observable. In one population, assortative matching according to types is sustained by signaling. In the other population, individuals do not signal and they are randomly matched. Types evolve within each population. At the same time, the two populations may engage in conflicts. Due to assortative matching, high types grow faster in the population with signaling, yet they bear the cost of signaling, which lowers their population’s fitness in the long run. Through simulations, we show that the survival of the signaling population depends crucially on the timing and the efficiency of weapons used in inter-group conflicts.
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Notes
The theory has been widely applied to explain different phenomena ranging from life sciences to social sciences. See further discussion of the subject in Grafen (1990), Maynard Smith and Harper (1995), Johnstone (1997), Zahavi and Zahavi (1997), Maynard Smith and Harper (2003), Searcy and Nowicki (2005), Getty (2006), Grose (2011) and Számadó (2012), among many others.
Note that joint foraging is usually considered as a typical example of a game with a dilemma and yet Inequality (1) does not reflect a dilemma situation. We want to emphasize that H and L are not strategies, but types of the individuals, and if we consider that different individuals are matched to play a game of dilemma, their equilibrium payoffs as functions of their types would match Inequality (1). Suppose when two individuals are matched, they play a prisoner’s dilemma type foraging game with two strategies: exerting a high effort or exerting a low effort. The low effort is the strictly dominant strategy in the game. Hence, both individuals in a pair always choose to exert the low effort and V(x, y) is the equilibrium payoff of an x-type individual against a y-type individual when both exert the low effort, where \(x\in \{H,L\}\). Assume that the H-type individual exerting the low effort is still more productive than the L-type individual and the two individuals in a pair are not sharing food equally but according to their productivity. Then we would still have Inequality (1).
Another common way of modeling inter-group conflict is to treat it as a game played between two groups. Individuals within a group can contribute to the group’s effort, which is costly to themselves, but beneficial to the group collectively in the conflict. Hence, an individual may have an incentive to free ride on fellow group members. See Bornstein (2003) for a review. Since our focus is on signaling behavior, we refrain from complicating the model by adding an extra layer of effort choice.
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We sincerely thank two anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions that greatly improve the paper. We also thank Wallice Ao, Jonathan Newton, Van Kolpin and Anne van den Nouweland for their comments.
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Holdahl, E., Wu, J. Conflicts, assortative matching, and the evolution of signaling norms. J Econ Interact Coord 18, 735–757 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11403-023-00384-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11403-023-00384-x