{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/an-evolutionary-game-theoretic-model-of-rhino","title":"An Evolutionary Game Theoretic Model of Rhino Horn Devaluation","arxiv_id":"1712.07640","date":"2017-12-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nikoleta E. Glynatsi","Vincent Knight","Tamsin E. Lee"],"abstract":"Rhino populations are at a critical level due to the demand for rhino horn\nand the subsequent poaching. Wildlife managers attempt to secure rhinos with\napproaches to devalue the horn, the most common of which is dehorning. Game\ntheory has been used to examine the interaction of poachers and wildlife\nmanagers where a manager can either `dehorn' their rhinos or leave the horn\nattached and poachers may behave `selectively' or `indiscriminately'. The\napproach described in this paper builds on this previous work and investigates\nthe interactions between the poachers. We build an evolutionary game theoretic\nmodel and determine which strategy is preferred by a poacher in various\ndifferent populations of poachers. The purpose of this work is to discover\nwhether conditions which encourage the poachers to behave selectively exist,\nthat is, they only kill those rhinos with full horns.\n  The analytical results show that full devaluation of all rhinos will likely\nlead to indiscriminate poaching. In turn it shows that devaluing of rhinos can\nonly be effective when implemented along with a strong disincentive framework.\nThis paper aims to contribute to the necessary research required for informed\ndiscussion about the lively debate on legalising rhino horn trade.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.07640v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.07640v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"an-evolutionary-game-theoretic-model-of-rhino","repo_url":"https://github.com/Nikoleta-v3/Evolutionary-game-theoretic-Model-of-Rhino-poaching","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}