A Model of Individual Adaptive Behavior in a Fluctuating Environment

Individual behavioral strategies that use conditional probabiltites for future environments and information about past environments are studied. The environments are random and Markovian. The individual uses the information available to it to prepare for the next environmental state in order to increase its fitness. The fitness depends on the discrepancy between the realized environment and that for which the individual is prepared. Additive and multiplicative combinations of the fitnesses accruing to the individual at each environmenal epoch are studied. A semi-optimal strategy is found, which maximizes individual fitness given the depth of information about the environment available to the individual. Randomly varying fitnesses and errors in the individual's perception of the environmental parameters may be included in the model.