This is because in the war of attrition any strategy that is unwavering and predictable is unstable, because it will ultimately be displaced by a mutant strategy which relies on the fact that it can best the existing predictable strategy by investing an extra small delta of waiting resource to ensure that it wins. Therefore, only a random unpredictable strategy can maintain itself in a population of bluffers. The contestants in effect choose an acceptable cost to be incurred related to the value of the resource being sought, effectively making a random bid as part of a mixed strategy (a strategy where a contestant has several, or even many, possible actions in their strategy). This implements a distribution of bids for a resource of specific value V, where the bid for any specific contest is chosen at random from that distribution. The distribution (an ESS) can be computed using the Bishop-Cannings theorem, which holds true for any mixed-strategy ESS. The distribution function in these contests was determined by Parker and Thompson to be: