Effects of diversity on multiagent systems: Minority games

Abstract

We consider a version of large population games whose agents compete for resources using strategies with adaptable preferences. The games can be used to model economic markets, ecosystems, or distributed control. Diversity of initial preferences of strategies is introduced by randomly assigning biases to the strategies of different agents. We find that diversity among the agents reduces their maladaptive behavior. We find interesting scaling relations with diversity for the variance and other parameters such as the convergence time, the fraction of fickle agents, and the variance of wealth, illustrating their dynamical origin. When diversity increases, the scaling dynamics is modified by kinetic sampling and waiting effects. Analyses yield excellent agreement with simulations.