Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
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Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. · Mar 2009
Conflicts of interest and the evolution of decision sharing.
Social animals regularly face consensus decisions whereby they choose, collectively, between mutually exclusive actions. Such decisions often involve conflicts of interest between group members with respect to preferred action. Conflicts could, in principle, be resolved, either by sharing decisions between members ('shared decisions') or by one 'dominant' member making decisions on behalf of the whole group ('unshared decisions'). ⋯ Selection favours unshared over shared decisions when conflicts are high relative to grouping benefits, and vice versa. These results differ from those of group decision models relating to activity timings. We attribute this to fundamental differences between collective decisions about modalities that are disjunct (here, space) or continuous (here, time) with respect to costs/benefits.