title: Modelling dominance hierarchy formation as a multi-player game.
abstract: Animals who live in groups need to divide available resources amongst themselves. This is often achieved by means of a dominance hierarchy, where dominant individuals obtain a larger share of the resources than subordinate individuals. This paper introduces a model of dominance hierarchy formation using a multi-player extension of the classical Hawk-Dove game. Animals play non-independent pairwise games in a Swiss tournament which pairs opponents against those which have performed equally well in the conflict so far, for a fixed number of rounds. Resources are divided according to the number of contests won. The model, and its emergent properties, are discussed in the context of experimental observations.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Statistics and Stochastic Modelling, School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Sussex, UK. m.broom@sussex.ac.uk
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Broom
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cannings
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D005716:Game Theory; D006126:Group Processes; D008960:Models, Psychological; D040841:Resource Allocation / Q000379:methods; D012930:Social Dominance