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Furthermore, benefits and costs can depend on a forager's community. For example, a forager living in a hive would most likely forage in a manner that would maximize efficiency for its colony rather than itself. [5] By identifying the currency, one can construct a hypothesis about which benefits and costs are important to the forager in question.
The Marginal Value Theorem is an optimality model that describes the strategy that maximizes gain per unit time in systems where resources, and thus rate of returns, decrease with time. [2] The model weighs benefits and costs and is used to predict giving up time and giving up density.
To construct an optimality model, the behavior must first be clearly defined. Then, descriptions of how the costs and benefits vary with the way the behavior is performed must be obtained. [1] Examples of benefits and costs include direct fitness measures like offspring produced, change in lifespan, time spent or gained, or energy spent and gained.
Or, where marginal revenue equals marginal cost. This level of effort maximizes the economic profit, or rent, of the resource being utilized. It usually corresponds to an effort level lower than that of maximum sustainable yield.
Learning is defined as an adaptive change or modification of a behavior based on a previous experience. [3] Since an animal's environment is constantly changing, the ability to adjust foraging behavior is essential for maximization of fitness.
A market can be said to have allocative efficiency if the price of a product that the market is supplying is equal to the marginal value consumers place on it, and equals marginal cost. In other words, when every good or service is produced up to the point where one more unit provides a marginal benefit to consumers less than the marginal cost ...
Allocative efficiency is a state of the economy in which production is aligned with the preferences of consumers and producers; in particular, the set of outputs is chosen so as to maximize the social welfare of society. [1] This is achieved if every produced good or service has a marginal benefit equal to the marginal cost of production.
Ecological facilitation or probiosis describes species interactions that benefit at least one of the participants and cause harm to neither. [1] Facilitations can be categorized as mutualisms, in which both species benefit, or commensalisms, in which one species benefits and the other is unaffected.