When more competitors means less harvested resource

Abstract

This paper presents a game theoretic model of a kind of contest competition for ripening resources. The author develops a simple, mathematically tractable version of the model and also exposes results of a classroom experiment and evolutionary simulations. Overall, theoretical and empirical results seem to generally agree, with the surprising result that more and more contestants “go fishing” when the number of competitors increases. The Nash equilibrium, which is evolutionarily unstable, looks like a good approximation for the evolutionary outcome, for reasons that are not totally clear yet.