Social play and tolerance are positively correlated and playful signals are more freely expressed in egalitarian than in despotic species. Macaque species are organized along a continuum from intolerant to tolerant social systems and, for this reason, they are good models to test some hypotheses about the possible linkage between communication and tolerance. We compared facial playful communica...

social relationships or dominance styles to variation in food resource characteristics, such as the distribution, abundance and quality of food resources. If resources are of high quality and spatially clumped, for example, they are monopolizable by an individual, which usually leads to a dominance effect on food intake, because higher ranking individuals have preferred access. In this case, it...

In animal societies, some stressful events can lead to higher levels of physiological stress. Such stressors, like social rank, also predict an increased vulnerability to an array of diseases. However, the physiological relationship between social rank and stress varies between different species, as well as within groups of a single species. For example, dominant individuals are more socially s...

In order to predict the features of non-raiding human warfare in small-scale, socially stratified societies, we study a coalitionary model of war that assumes that individuals participate voluntarily because their decisions serve to maximize fitness. Individual males join the coalition if war results in a net economic and thus fitness benefit. Within the model, viable offensive war ensues if th...

Merging patterns and processes about the way individuals should be distributed in a habitat is a key issue in the framework of spatial ecology. Here the despotic distribution of individuals in two distinct and neighboring patches within a local population of a long-lived colonial bird, the Yellow-legged Gull (Larus michahellis), was assessed. There was no density dependence for suitable habitat...

When travelling in groups, animals frequently have to make decisions on the direction of travel. These decisions can be based on consensus, when all individuals take part in the decision (i.e. democratic decision; social information), or leadership, when one member or a minority of members make the decision (i.e. despotic decision; personal information). Here we investigated whether decision-ma...

Purpose – To examine whether the framework of management accounting transformations in Hopper et al. (2009) applies to accounting changes in the Ashanti Gold Corporation (AGC) in Ghana over 120 years from pre-colonialism to recent times. Design/methodology/approach – Mixed data sources are used, namely interviews, observations of practices, historical documentation, company reports, and researc...

Purpose – To examine whether the framework of management accounting transformations in Hopper et al. (2009) applies to accounting changes in the Ashanti Gold Corporation (AGC) in Ghana over 120 years from pre-colonialism to recent times. Design/methodology/approach – Mixed data sources are used, namely interviews, observations of practices, historical documentation, company reports, and researc...