Successful strategies in repeated minority games

Abstract

The minority game is an important example of a non-cooperative n-person game, which can be applied on different situations with social and economic contexts. We analysed the minority game as an elementary traffic scenario in which human participants had to choose 100 times between a road A and a road B. In each period, the road, which was chosen by the minority of players won. At first view, there seems to be no outstandingly advisable strategy for the participants to enhance their payoffs because both roads have the same properties. However, an important observation is that the number of road changes of a participant is negatively correlated to his/her cumulative payoff. On average, subjects with high numbers of road changes received less money than participants who stoically chose the same road. Furthermore one could increase the coordination of the players by providing the players distribution on both roads in the last period.