Effects of resource availability on consensus decision making in primates

There has recently been increasing interest in group decision making, and in particular the mechanisms through which a group of individuals can arrive at a consensus decision. In this paper we investigate the effects of resource availability upon consensus decision making in a primate group. We extend an existing agent-based model of primate decision making to incorporate a model of diminishing foraging returns, and show that the difficulty of obtaining energy from the environment has an impact on successful strategies for consensus decision making in such groups. Moreover, the introduction of diminishing returns also results in better agreement between the predictions of the model and field studies of a naturally occurring primate group.