Enhanced Food Availability can Deteriorate Fitness through Excessive Scrounging

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that increasing food availability or resource capacity in group settings can paradoxically reduce overall consumption or productivity due to heightened scrounging or free-riding behaviors, depending on specific conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic model showing that higher resource levels can lead to increased scrounging or free-riding, decreasing individual and group benefits, which challenges conventional assumptions.

Findings

Higher food availability can increase scrounging behavior.

Enhanced production capacity may trigger free-riding, reducing productivity.

Resource abundance does not always improve individual or group outcomes.

Abstract

In group foraging situations, the conventional expectation is that increased food availability would enhance consumption, especially when animals prioritize maximizing their food intake. This paper challenges this conventional wisdom by conducting an in-depth game-theoretic analysis of a basic producer-scrounger model, in which animals must choose between intensive food searching as producers or moderate searching while relying on group members as scroungers. Surprisingly, our study reveals that, under certain circumstances, increasing food availability can amplify the inclination to scrounge to such an extent that it paradoxically leads to a reduction in animals' food consumption compared to scenarios with limited food availability. We further illustrate a similar phenomenon in a model capturing free-riding dynamics among workers in a company. We demonstrate that, under certain reward mechanisms, enhancing workers' production capacities can inadvertently trigger a surge in free-riding behavior, leading to both diminished group productivity and reduced individual payoffs. Our findings underscore the significance of contextual factors when comprehending and predicting the impact of resource availability on individual and collective outcomes.