The strategic problem the female faces is how to screen out bad males, and this is where long courtship comes into play. A female would like to mate with a good male, but cannot tell a male's type from his appearance alone. This may help to explain the commonly held belief that a woman is best advised not to sleep with a man on a first date.”ĭr Peter Sozou, Warwick Medical School and LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, says: “From a female's point of view, males are not all equal. Long courtship is a price paid for increasing the chance that mating, if it occurs, will be a harmonious match which benefits both sexes. A male's willingness to court for a long time is a signal that he is likely to be a good male. “By delaying mating, the female is able to reduce the chance that she will mate with a bad male. Why don't people and other animals speed things up to reduce these costs? The answer seems to be that longer courtship is a way for the female to acquire information about the male. One partner - often the male - may pay the greater part of the financial cost, but to both sexes there is a significant cost of time which could be spent on other productive activities. Human courtship, for example, can involve a sequence of dinners, theatre trips and other outings lasting months or even years. Professor Robert Seymour, UCL Mathematics, says: “Courtship in a number of animal species occurs over an extended period of time. Because bad males have a greater tendency to quit the courtship game early, as time goes on and the male has not quit it becomes increasingly probable that he is a “good” male. By delaying mating, the female is able to make some use of this information to achieve a degree of screening. In this way the duration of a male’s courtship effort carries information about his type. It shows that extended courtship can take place, with a good male being willing to court for longer than a bad male and the female delaying mating. The study looks for evolutionarily stable equilibrium behaviours, in which females are doing as well as they can against male behaviour and males are doing as well as they can against female behaviour. In contrast, a male gets a positive payoff from mating with any female, though his payoff is higher if he is “good” than if he is “bad”. The female gets a positive payoff from mating if the male is a ‘‘good’’ male but a negative payoff if he is ‘‘bad’’, so it is in her interest to gain information about the male’s type with the aim of avoiding mating with a “bad” male. The model assumes that the male is either a ‘‘good’’ or a ‘‘bad’’ type from the female’s point of view, according to his condition or willingness to care for the young after mating. The mathematical model considers a male and a female in a courtship encounter of unspecified duration, with the game ending when one or other party quits or the female accepts the male as a mate. The research uses game theory to analyse how males and females behave strategically towards each other in the mating game.
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