Conveners
Human behaviour, decisions
- Michael Plank (University of Canterbury)
The illegal trade of wildlife is estimated to run into hundreds of millions of dollars. It is an international problem that exploits both enforcement loopholes and corruption, and it is a direct threat to the survival of plant and animal species. Smugglers transport wildlife and their derivatives from sources to destinations across the globe. They are able to choose the route they take to move...
Illegal exploitation of wildlife is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity, affecting over 2,000 species. Traditionally, actions to reduce poaching have focussed on increasing the efficacy and capacity of law enforcement. However, recently, non-governmental agencies (NGOs) are heavily investing in alternative interventions to reduce consumer demand for poached wildlife products. But which...
Unlike any great apes, humans have expanded into a wide variety of habitats during the course of evolution, beginning with the transition by australopithecines from forest to savanna habitation. Novel environments are likely to have imposed hominids a demographic challenge due to such factors as higher predation risk and scarcer food resources. In fact, recent studies have found a paucity of...
Large-game hunting in human hunter-gatherers is a counter-intuitive behaviour. Despite low daily success rates and large proportions of sharing, hunter-gatherers invest in large-game hunting over the less-wasteful strategy of small-game hunting. Where investment in small-game hunting could provide a more reliable and consistent source of direct benefit to one’s offspring, large-game hunting is...
Private assessment in indirect reciprocity is a natural assumption because individuals can assess others privately in this situation. However, only few studies have considered private assessment because of analytical difficulty that it present. Here, we develop an analytical method using solitary observation to solve private assessment in indirect reciprocity problem without any approximation....
When one makes his/her decision, he/she often refers to others’ opinions. We describe this situation by a network model with the nodes representing individuals and the links representing references between them. Our question is how people’s reference structure self-organizes, when each individual tries to provide correct answers by referring to more accurate agents.
To answer these questions,...