Section: Ecology
Topic: Ecology, Applied mathematics, Population biology

Beating your Neighbor to the Berry Patch

Rogers, Alan R.1  
1 Dept. of Anthropology, University of Utah, USA

10.24072/pcjournal.133 - Peer Community Journal, Volume 2 (2022), article no. e34.

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Foragers often compete for resources that ripen (or otherwise improve) gradually. What strategy is optimal in this situation? It turns out that there is no optimal strategy. There is no evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), and the only Nash equilibrium (NE) is unstable: strategies similar to the NE can always invade.  But in spite of this instability, the NE is predictive. If harvesting attempts are costly or there are many competitors, the process tends to remain near the unstable NE.  In this case, the resource often goes unharvested. Harvesting attempts--when they happen at all--usually occur when the resource is barely ripe enough to offset costs. The more foragers there are, the lower the chance that the resource will be harvested and the greater its mean value when harvested. This counterintuitive behavior is exhibited not only by theoretical models and computer simulations, but also by human subjects in an experimental game.

Published online:
DOI: 10.24072/pcjournal.133
Type: Research article

Rogers, Alan R. 1

1 Dept. of Anthropology, University of Utah, USA
License: CC-BY 4.0
Copyrights: The authors retain unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights 
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Rogers, Alan R. Beating your Neighbor to the Berry Patch. Peer Community Journal, Volume 2 (2022), article  no. e34. doi : 10.24072/pcjournal.133. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal.133/

PCI peer reviews and recommendation, and links to data, scripts, code and supplementary information: 10.24072/pci.ecology.100088

Conflict of interest of the recommender and peer reviewers:
The recommender in charge of the evaluation of the article and the reviewers declared that they have no conflict of interest (as defined in the code of conduct of PCI) with the authors or with the content of the article.

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