Dynamic Sociality Minority Game

The minority game (MG) is a simple yet effective binary decision model which is well suited to study the collective emerging behaviour in a population of agents with bounded and inductive rationality when they have to compete, through adaptation, for scarce resources. The original formulation of the MG was inspired by the W.B. Arthur’s El Farol Bar problem in which a fixed number of people have to independently decide each week whether to go to a bar having a limited capacity. A decision is only affected by information on the number of visitors who attended the bar in the past weeks. In its basic version, the MG does not contemplate communication among players and it supposes that information about the past game outcomes is publicly available. This paper proposes the Dynamic Sociality Minority Game (DSMG), an original variant of the classic MG where (i) information about the outcome of the previously played game step is assumed to be known only by the agents that really attended the bar the previous week and (ii) a dynamically established acquaintance relationship is introduced to propagate such information among non attendant players. Particular game settings are identified which make DSMG able to exhibits a better coordination level among players with respect to standard MG. Behavioral properties of the DSMG are thoroughly analyzed through an agent-based simulation of a simple road-traffic model.