Hawk-Dove Game

The Hawk-Dove game is a model in evolutionary game theory describing conflict between individuals competing for a shared, indivisible resource, in which each individual can adopt a Hawk strategy, escalating the contest and risking injury, or a Dove strategy, displaying but retreating before real conflict. It was introduced in 1973 by the biologist John Maynard Smith and the geneticist George Price as part of their foundational paper defining the evolutionarily stable strategy, a concept borrowed from economic game theory and adapted to explain how a mixture of aggressive and passive behaviors can be stable within an animal population even though pure aggression would seem to be individually advantageous. Because escalated fights carry a real cost of injury, the model shows that when the cost of losing a fight outweighs the value of the resource being contested, a stable population settles into a mix of hawk-like and dove-like individuals, or into individuals who mix the two strategies at random, rather than an all-hawk population destroying itself.