Incentives in the family II: Behavioral dynamics and the evolution of non-costly signaling

In many biological and social interactions, individuals with private information have incentives to misrepresent their information. A prominent example is when offspring know their need or condition but the parents do not. Theory showed that signal costs can ensure truthful communication in such situations, but further studies have cast in doubt whether empirically measured costs are high enough to sustain honesty, and whether the costly signaling equilibrium represents a fitness advantage over non-signaling. Here, I tackle these issues with a model of signaling that takes place at the behavioral time-scale through dynamic responses of individuals to each other. I then embed this behavioral model in an evolutionary one that asks how the decision rules of the parent and offspring evolve in response to the trade-off between signal costs and the costs of provisioning. I find that a non-costly honest signaling equilibrium can evolve when relatedness between siblings is above a certain threshold. This threshold is lower when (i) offspring get satiated more quickly, (ii) the cost of provisioning to the parent escalates less rapidly, or (iii) the variation in offspring need is higher. These results provide a potential resolution to the apparent paradox of costly begging. I also discuss the relation between costly signaling and mechanism design theories.

► An offspring signals its need to the parent through behavioral dynamics.
► Decision rules of the individuals evolve in response to the outcome of the behavioral dynamics.
► This two-tiered evolution can lead to perfectly informative signaling without costs.