Hawk & Dove Game
• Consider a game where there are just two
strategies.
• 'Hawks‘ always fight to injure and kill their
opponents, though in the process they will risk
injury themselves.
• 'Doves' simply display and never engage in
serious fights.
• Although simple, these two strategies are chosen
to represent the two possible extremes we may
see in nature.
• In this evolutionary game, let the winner of a
contest score +50, and the loser 0.
• The cost of a serious injury is - 100 and the cost
of wasting time in a display is - 10.
• These pay-offs are measures of fitness and we
will assume, for simplicity, that Hawk and Dove
reproduce their own kind faithfully in proportion
to their pay-offs.
• The next step is to draw up a two by two matrix
with the average pay-offs for the four possible
types of encounter.
• How would evolution proceed in this particular game?
• Consider what would happen if all individuals in the
population are Doves.
• Every contest is between a Dove and another Dove and
the payoff is on average + 15.
• In this population, any mutant Hawk would do very well
and the Hawk strategy would soon spread because when
a Hawk meets a Dove it gets +50.
• It is clear that Dove is not an ESS.
• However, Hawk would not spread to take over the entire
population.
• In a population of all Hawks the average pay-off is -25
and any mutant Dove would do better because when a
Dove meets a Hawk it gets 0.
• The Dove strategy would spread if the population consisted
mainly of Hawks. Therefore Hawk is not an ESS either.
• A mixture of Hawks and Doves could be stable.
• The stable equilibrium will be when the average pay-offs
for a Hawk are equal to the average pay-offs for a Dove.
• If the population moved away from this equilibrium then
either Dove or Hawk would be doing better and so the
population would not be stable.
• Each strategy does best when it is relatively rare and the
tendency in this evolutionary game will be for frequency-
dependent selection to drive the frequencies of Hawk and
Dove in the population so that they each enjoy the same
success.
• The stable mixture can be calculated as follows
• Let h be the proportion of Hawks in the
population. Therefore, the proportion of Doves
must be (l -h).
• The average pay-off for a Hawk is the pay-off
for each type of fight multiplied by the
probability of meeting each type of contestant.
• Therefore
• Similarly for the average payoff will be
• At the stable equilibrium (the ESS), H is equal to D. Solving the
two equations H = D gives h = 7/12, and therefore, by subtraction,
the proportion of Doves ( l - h ) must be 5/12
• ESS could be achieved in two distinct ways.
• 1 The population could consist of individuals who played pure
strategies. Each individual would either be Hawk or Dove, and the
ESS would come about with 7/12 of the population being Hawks
and 5/12 Doves.
• 2 The population could consist of individuals who all adopted
a mixed strategy, playing Hawk with probability 7/12 and Dove
with probability 5/12, choosing at random which strategy to play
in each contest.
• It is instructive to note that at the ESS, the average pay-off is 6.25
per contest. This is less than the average pay-off which individuals
would enjoy if they all agreed to fight as Doves, namely 15!
Hawk, Dove & Bourgeois
• Now imagine another strategy in this game,
'Bourgeois'.
• With this strategy the individual plays 'Hawk,
if owner' and 'Dove, if intruder'. In other
words, it fights hard if it's the owner but
always retreats if it's the intruder.
• Let us keep the same pay-offs as before and,
for simplicity, imagine that a Bourgeois
individual finds itself owner half the time and
intruder half the time.
• If all the population are playing this strategy, no one
ever engages in escalated fights because when two
individuals contest for a resource, one is owner and the
other is intruder; the result is that the intruder always
gives way.
• With everyone playing the Bourgeois strategy the
average pay-off for a contest is +25.
• This is stable against invasion by Hawks, who would
only get +l2.5, and also stable against Doves, who
would only get +7.5.
• If all the population played Hawk, both Dove and
Bourgeois could invade and do better.
• If all the population played Dove, then both Hawk and
Bourgeois could invade.
