Exploiting Social Capabilities in the Minority Game

The minority game (MG) is an inductive binary-decision model that is able to study emergent behaviors ina population of agents which compete, through adaptation, for scarce resources. The original formulationof the game was inspired by the W.B. Arthur’s El Farol Bar problem: a fixed number of people have toindependently decide, each week, whether to go to a bar having a limited capacity. People’s choices areonly affected by the information about the number of visitors who attended the bar in the past weeks.Basic MG assumes that the information about the past game outcomes is publicly available, and it doesnot contemplate any communication among players. This paper proposes the Dynamic Sociality MinorityGame (DSMG). DSMG is an original variant of the classic MG where: (i) information about the outcome ofthe previously played game step is only known to agents that really attended the bar the previous week,(ii) a dynamically established acquaintance network is introduced to propagate such information to non-attendant players. Specific settings of the game are identified in which DSMG is able to show a bettercoordination level among players with respect to the standard MG. Emergent properties of the DSMG alongwith players’ wellness are thoroughly analyzed through agent-based simulation of a simple road-trafficmodel.