IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/dyngam/v4y2014i4p379-390.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Economics of Egg Trading: Mating Rate, Sperm Competition and Positive Frequency-Dependence

Author

Listed:
  • Jonathan Henshaw
  • Michael Jennions
  • Hanna Kokko

Abstract

Egg trading—the alternating exchange of egg parcels during mating by simultaneous hermaphrodites—is one of the best-documented examples of reciprocity between non-relatives. By offering eggs only to partners who reciprocate, traders increase their reproductive success in the male role, but at a potential cost of delaying or reducing fertilisation of their own eggs. Although several authors have considered the evolutionary stability of egg trading once it has evolved, little attention has been paid to how egg trading can invade a population in the first place. We begin to tackle this problem by formally showing that egg trading is under positive frequency-dependent selection: once the proportion of traders in a population exceeds a certain threshold, egg trading will go to fixation. We show that if mate encounters occur frequently, then the cost of withholding eggs from unreciprocating partners is reduced, making it easier for egg trading to evolve. In contrast, the presence of opportunistic ‘streaking’, where unpaired individuals join mating pairs but contribute only sperm, makes it more difficult for egg trading to invade. This is because streakers weaken the link between the number of eggs an individual can offer and its male-role reproductive success. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Suggested Citation

  • Jonathan Henshaw & Michael Jennions & Hanna Kokko, 2014. "The Economics of Egg Trading: Mating Rate, Sperm Competition and Positive Frequency-Dependence," Dynamic Games and Applications, Springer, vol. 4(4), pages 379-390, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:dyngam:v:4:y:2014:i:4:p:379-390
    DOI: 10.1007/s13235-014-0107-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s13235-014-0107-1
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s13235-014-0107-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tim Clutton-Brock, 2009. "Cooperation between non-kin in animal societies," Nature, Nature, vol. 462(7269), pages 51-57, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peña, Jorge & Nöldeke, Georg & Puebla, Oscar, 2018. "The evolution of egg trading in simultaneous hermaphrodites," IAST Working Papers 18-85, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Friedrich, T., 2009. "Wise exploitation – a game with a higher productivity than cooperation – transforms biological productivity into economic productivity," MPRA Paper 22862, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Som B Ale & Joel S Brown & Amy T Sullivan, 2013. "Evolution of Cooperation: Combining Kin Selection and Reciprocal Altruism into Matrix Games with Social Dilemmas," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(5), pages 1-8, May.
    3. Quan, Ji & Cui, Shihui & Chen, Wenman & Wang, Xianjia, 2023. "Reputation-based probabilistic punishment on the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 441(C).
    4. Gladys Barragan & Maxime Cauchoix & Anne Regnier & Marie Bourjade & Astrid Hopfensitz & Alexis Chaine, 2021. "Schoolchildren cooperate more successfully with non-kin than with siblings," Post-Print hal-03167067, HAL.
    5. Schimit, P.H.T. & Santos, B.O. & Soares, C.A., 2015. "Evolution of cooperation in Axelrod tournament using cellular automata," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 437(C), pages 204-217.
    6. Feng Zhang & Cang Hui, 2011. "Eco-Evolutionary Feedback and the Invasion of Cooperation in Prisoner's Dilemma Games," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(11), pages 1-7, November.
    7. Sergio Beraldo & Robert Sugden, 2010. "The emergence of reciprocally beneficial cooperation," ICER Working Papers 18-2010, ICER - International Centre for Economic Research.
    8. Friedrich, T., 2010. "The transfer space," MPRA Paper 23643, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Gao, Lei & Li, Yaotang & Wang, Zhen & Wang, Rui-Wu, 2022. "Asymmetric strategy setup solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma of the evolution of mutualism," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 412(C).
    10. Zhu, Jiabao & Liu, Xingwen, 2021. "The number of strategy changes can be used to promote cooperation in spatial snowdrift game," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 575(C).
    11. Hammerstein, Peter & Leimar, Olof, 2015. "Evolutionary Game Theory in Biology," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,, Elsevier.
    12. Hernando Santamaría-García & Miguel Burgaleta & Agustina Legaz & Daniel Flichtentrei & Mateo Córdoba-Delgado & Juliana Molina-Paredes & Juliana Linares-Puerta & Juan Montealegre-Gómez & Sandra Castelb, 2022. "The price of prosociality in pandemic times," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-12, December.
    13. Damien Francey & Ralph Bergmüller, 2012. "Images of Eyes Enhance Investments in a Real-Life Public Good," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(5), pages 1-7, May.
    14. Dirk Helbing & Anders Johansson, 2010. "Cooperation, Norms, and Revolutions: A Unified Game-Theoretical Approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 5(10), pages 1-15, October.
    15. Hannes Rusch, 2013. "What niche did human cooperativeness evolve in?," MAGKS Papers on Economics 201327, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Faculty of Business Administration and Economics, Department of Economics (Volkswirtschaftliche Abteilung).
    16. Li-Li Li & Joshua M Plotnik & Shang-Wen Xia & Estelle Meaux & Rui-Chang Quan, 2021. "Cooperating elephants mitigate competition until the stakes get too high," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 19(9), pages 1-23, September.
    17. Mohammad Salahshour, 2021. "Freedom to choose between public resources promotes cooperation," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 17(2), pages 1-15, February.
    18. Rufus A. Johnstone & Andrea Manica & Annette L. Fayet & Mary Caswell Stoddard & Miguel A. Rodriguez-Gironés & Camilla A. Hinde, 2014. "Reciprocity and conditional cooperation between great tit parents," Behavioral Ecology, International Society for Behavioral Ecology, vol. 25(1), pages 216-222.
    19. Paganelli, Maria Pia, 2011. "The same face of the two Smiths: Adam Smith and Vernon Smith," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 78(3), pages 246-255, May.
    20. Kurokawa, Shun, 2022. "Evolution of trustfulness in the case where resources for cooperation are sometimes absent," Theoretical Population Biology, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 63-79.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:dyngam:v:4:y:2014:i:4:p:379-390. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.