When honesty and cheating pay off: the evolution of honest and dishonest equilibria in a conventional signalling game.
Szabolcs SzámadóPublished in: BMC evolutionary biology (2017)
Both honest signalling and polymorphic cheating equilibria are more likely to evolve from a narrow strategy set than from a random mixture of strategies. A large potential strategy set is not a setback for the evolution of communication -honest or cheating- as long as the initial population is seeded with only a few strategies. In addition, different sections of the parameter space show consistently different behaviour. Thus, frequency dependent selection has the potential to explain various empirical observations that show consistent differences in aggressive behaviour.