https://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article3399671.ece
http://findarticales.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_4_166/ai_n6151880/
In a recent article on the timesonline.co.uk website, game theory was related to the politics in relations to the Tories. In the article,game theory’s selfish strategies and cooperative strategies are discussed and an interesting point about vampire bats were mentioned. Upon some searching, I came across and article in Science News further explaining the example of the vampire bats.
Given a successful night of hunting, a vampire bat would often share the blood that it had gathered throughout the night with other bats that had not had a successful night of hunting. Taking each bat as players in the game of survival, such actions are not the ones predicted through game theory modeled by the prisoner’s dilemma. For a bat, hoarding the excess blood and surviving well after the other bats logically would be the goal. The reward for obtaining this goal is the opportunity to further reproduce and to pass their own genes to their off-spring. However, as this article discusses, due to evolution and lessons learned from previous generations of bats, the bats shares the excess blood would benefit the colony as a whole and in essence allows for others to benefit as well.
The article also discusses the prisoner’s dilemma but further mentions that it is an insufficient model for this specific case since it focuses on the self-preservation motivated strategies. A different strategy, the cooperation strategy such as our hawk-dove game, is modeled by two cars stuck in a snowdrift. Without going into details of this game, the outcome shows that the decisions of each player will depend heavily on the decision made by the other. For example, given that two cars are stuck in the same mound of snow, each has the options of shoveling the snow or sitting in their cars. In this case, if both players see that the other is sitting in, they no longer have the option to sit in because then no snow would be moved. Thus, both players will end up cooperating and in essence sacrifice their own comfort to benefit the group.
This sentence is very misleading: “However, as this article discusses, due to evolution and lessons learned from previous generations of bats, the bats shares the excess blood would benefit the colony as a whole and in essence allows for others to benefit as well.”
The reason why bats will share with other bats is that bats have memories and punish bats that don’t share. A bat that doesn’t share will be not shared with later on, and non-sharing bats have a measurably higher death rate. The existence of punishment changes the payoffs of the game.
Doing something “for the good of the colony” does not exist in biology (or human behavior) without appropriate modification of payoffs to make it “for the good of the individual” as well.