Summary 1 Contests may involve injurious fighting, other types of direct physical aggression
and communication. They occur over ownership access to mates and other resources that …

Honest signalling assumes a correlation between an observable signal and a
nonobservable quality. There are many mutually nonexclusive mechanisms that can …

Many of the colour displays of animals are proposed to have evolved in response to female
mate choice for honest signals of quality, but such honest signalling requires mechanisms to …

The function of aggressive signals, including both their information content and the
circumstances under which they cause resolution or escalation of conflict, continues to be …

The honesty of animal communication has long been disputed and continues to be largely
associated with the “handicap principle,” in which strategic costs are paid by signalers in …

Artificial Life models have consistently implemented communication as an exchange of
signals over dedicated and functionally isolated channels. I argue that such a feature …

Sexual selection theory aims to explain the evolution of extravagant traits that should
seemingly impose a survival cost on the bearer (reviewed in Andersson [1994] and …

Animal contests were the focal topic that brought game theory to the attention of behavioural
ecologists, giving rise to evolutionary game theory. Game theory has remained by far the …

Empirical evidence suggests that aggressiveness (willingness to enter into, or escalate an
aggressive interaction) may be more important than the ability to win fights in some species …

The rapid increase in the understanding of biological communication has been largely
theory driven. Game-theoretical models have completely changed how behavioural …