Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 364, Issue 1518, Pages 807-819Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0257
Keywords
collective decisions; conflict resolution; consensus decisions; cooperation; information pooling; speed versus accuracy trade-off
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society University
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Social animals regularly face consensus decisions whereby they choose, collectively, between mutually exclusive actions. Such decisions often involve conflicts of interest between group members with respect to preferred action. Conflicts could, in principle, be resolved, either by sharing decisions between members ('shared decisions') or by one 'dominant' member making decisions on behalf of the whole group ('unshared decisions'). Both, shared and unshared decisions, have been observed. However, it is unclear as to what favours the evolution of either decision type. Here, after a brief literature review, we present a novelmethod, involving a combination of self-organizing system and game theory modelling, of investigating the evolution of shared and unshared decisions. We apply the method to decisions on movement direction. We find that both, shared and unshared, decisions can evolve without individuals having a global overview of the group's behaviour or any knowledge about other members' preferences or intentions. Selection favours unshared over shared decisions when conflicts are high relative to grouping benefits, and vice versa. These results differ from those of group decision models relating to activity timings. We attribute this to fundamental differences between collective decisions about modalities that are disjunct (here, space) or continuous (here, time) with respect to costs/benefits.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available