When Doves Conspire: Evolution of Nondamaging Fighting Tactics in a Nonrandom-Encounter Animal Conflict Model

Models of evolution of animal fighting strategies generally assume that contestants encounter each other perfectly randomly with respect to strategy type. I modified two game-theory models of J. Maynard Smith, G. R. Price, and G. A. Parker to include any amount of encounter nonrandomness. Analysis of my models demonstrates that assortative encounters (in which like encounters like with greater than chance probability) favor evolution of pure conventional fighting tactics, and that a "conspiracy of doves" can be an evolutionarily stable population under these conditions.