No Arabic abstract
We discuss the strategy that rational agents can use to maximize their expected long-term payoff in the co-action minority game. We argue that the agents will try to get into a cyclic state, where each of the $(2N +1)$ agent wins exactly $N$ times in any continuous stretch of $(2N+1)$ days. We propose and analyse a strategy for reaching such a cyclic state quickly, when any direct communication between agents is not allowed, and only the publicly available common information is the record of total number of people choosing the first restaurant in the past. We determine exactly the average time required to reach the periodic state for this strategy. We show that it varies as $(N/ln 2) [1 + alpha cos (2 pi log_2 N)$], for large $N$, where the amplitude $alpha$ of the leading term in the log-periodic oscillations is found be $frac{8 pi^2}{(ln 2)^2} exp{(- 2 pi^2/ln 2)} approx {color{blue}7 times 10^{-11}}$.
We study a variation of the minority game. There are N agents. Each has to choose between one of two alternatives everyday, and there is reward to each member of the smaller group. The agents cannot communicate with each other, but try to guess the choice others will make, based only the past history of number of people choosing the two alternatives. We describe a simple probabilistic strategy using which the agents acting independently, can still maximize the average number of people benefitting every day. The strategy leads to a very efficient utilization of resources, and the average deviation from the maximum possible can be made of order $(N^{epsilon})$, for any $epsilon >0$. We also show that a single agent does not expect to gain by not following the strategy.
We propose a new model of minority game with so-called smart agents such that the standard deviation and the total loss in this model reach the theoretical minimum values in the limit of long time. The smart agents use trail and error method to make a choice but bring global optimization to the system, which suggests that the economic systems may have the ability to self-organize into a highly optimized state by agents who are forced to make decisions based on inductive thinking for their limited knowledge and capabilities. When other kinds of agents are also present, the experimental results and analyses show that the smart agent can gain profits from producers and are much more competent than the noise traders and conventional agents in original minority game.
Minority game is a model of heterogeneous players who think inductively. In this game, each player chooses one out of two alternatives every turn and those who end up in the minority side wins. It is instructive to extend the minority game by allowing players to choose one out of many alternatives. Nevertheless, such an extension is not straight-forward due to the difficulties in finding a set of reasonable, unbiased and computationally feasible strategies. Here, we propose a variation of the minority game where every player has more than two options. Results of numerical simulations agree with the expectation that our multiple choices minority game exhibits similar behavior as the original two-choice minority game.
We introduce a version of the Minority Game where the total number of available choices is $D>2$, but the agents only have two available choices to switch. For all agents at an instant in any given choice, therefore, the other choice is distributed between the remaining $D-1$ options. This brings in the added complexity in reaching a state with the maximum resource utilization, in the sense that the game is essentially a set of MG that are coupled and played in parallel. We show that a stochastic strategy, used in the MG, works well here too. We discuss the limits in which the model reduces to other known models. Finally, we study an application of the model in the context of population movement between various states within a country during an ongoing epidemic. We show that the total infected population in the country could be as low as that achieved with a complete stoppage of inter-region movements for a prolonged period, provided that the agents instead follow the above mentioned stochastic strategy for their movement decisions between their two choices. The objective for an agent is to stay in the lower infected state between their two choices. We further show that it is the agents moving once between any two states, following the stochastic strategy, who are less likely to be infected than those not having (or not opting for) such a movement choice, when the risk of getting infected during the travel is not considered. This shows the incentive for the moving agents to follow the stochastic strategy.
What is the physical origin of player cooperation in minority game? And how to obtain maximum global wealth in minority game? We answer the above questions by studying a variant of minority game from which players choose among $N_c$ alternatives according to strategies picked from a restricted set of strategy space. Our numerical experiment concludes that player cooperation is the result of a suitable size of sampling in the available strategy space. Hence, the overall performance of the game can be improved by suitably adjusting the strategy space size.