Economic explanation for piracy and the prisoner's dilemma
aldalire @ aldalire @lemmy.dbzer0.com Posts 45Comments 439Joined 2 yr. ago
aldalire @ aldalire @lemmy.dbzer0.com
Posts
45
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439
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As a cool sidenote: evolutionary game theory is, unsurprisingly, rooted in biology. It was used to model the populations of various species of animals by quantifying the payouts of their behavior in relation to other animals in the ecosystem. Here's a quote from Game Theory, Alive:
"A new perspective was proposed by John Maynard Smith and George Price in 1973: Each player could be an organism whose pure strategy is encoded in its genes"
The model isn't too far off from what happens in reality. Some species of animals actually follow the expected behavior of what will happen when individuals in a population play a game of "rock-paper-scissors"
The side-blotched lizard Uta stansburiana has three distinct types of male: orange-throat, blue-throat, and yellow-striped. All females of the species are yellow- striped. The orange-throated males are violently aggressive, keep large harems of females, and defend large territories. The yellow-striped males are docile and look like receptive females. In fact, the orange-throats can’t distinguish between the yellow-striped males and females. This enables the yellow-striped males to sneak into their territory and secretly copulate with the females. The blue-throats are less aggressive than the orange-throats, keep smaller harems (small enough to distinguish their females from yellow-striped males), and defend small territories. Researchers have observed a six-year cycle starting with domination, say, by the orange-throats. Eventually, the orange-throats amass territories and harems so large that they can no longer be guarded effectively against the sneaky yellow- striped males, who are able to secure a majority of copulations and produce the largest number of offspring. When the yellow-striped lizards become very com- mon, however, the males of the blue-throated variety get an edge: Since they have small harems, they can detect yellow-striped males and prevent them from invad- ing their harems. Thus, a period when the blue-throats become dominant follows. However, the aggressive orange-throats do comparatively well against blue-throats since they can challenge them and acquire their harems and territories, thus prop- agating themselves. In this manner, the population frequencies eventually return to the original ones, and the cycle begins anew. When John Maynard Smith learned that Uta stansburia were “playing” Rock- Paper-Scissors, he reportedly exclaimed, “They have read my book!”
Hope you liked my unhinged post guys :-)