Dog Hunt (Sh) Game Theory

Introduction

The Stag Hunt (SH) game was first created by Jack Jean Rousseau’s A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1755 (Kimbrough, 2005). In the original source, he proposed a case where two hunters who can work together to hunt a big reward, the stag, or hunt alone and hunt a smaller hare. This essay will offer two cases of the Stag Hunt game. The first is killer whale (orca) carousel feeding. They may collaborate with other orcas to round up fish and the eat them all, known as carousel feeding (Similä, 1997), or may defect and eat what fish they find. Carousel feeding only works if they work together. The second case is a completely different situation: showing late up to a party. Individuals will only show up early to a party if they know all other will do so too (Farnam Street, 2009). If they doubt this, they will arrive late, which yields a smaller reward in the form of less fun. The main difference that this essay will attempt to explain is why players in the first case converge on

The proposed examples have shown how in two different cases, some players tend to cooperate and other tend to defect. Both stand to win considerably more by cooperating, but because of the risk and uncertainty that this move would result in, opting for defection appears to be a much safer choice. Studies have shown how animals with very limited intentional communication cooperate 91% of the time (Bullinger et al, 2011), which offers one possible reason as to why this occurs.
The Stag Hunt game is, especially when compared to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a greatly under-researched area, and as such could greatly benefit from further studies to shed some light on its process. There has been some degree of mathematical research, but it may be the case that human logic and reasoning is incompatible with this approach