The underlying complex network of the Minority Game

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of the underlying networks in the Minority Game, revealing how different phases correspond to distinct network topologies like small-world and random networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel network-based approach to analyze the Minority Game, linking strategy similarity to network properties and characterizing different phases through network analysis.

Findings

Crowd phase corresponds to small-world networks.

Anticrowd phase resembles random networks.

Degree distribution matches theoretical predictions.

Abstract

We study the structure of the underlying network of connections in the Minority Game. There is not an explicit interaction among the agents, but they interact via global magnitudes of the model and mainly through their strategies. We define a link between two agents by quantifying the similarity among their strategies, and analyze the structure of the resulting underlying complex networks as a function of the number of agents in the game and the value of the agents' memory, in games with two strategies per player. We characterize the different phases of this system with networks with different properties, for this link definition. Thus, the Minority Game phase characterized by the presence of crowds can be identified with a small world network, while the phase with the same results as a random decision game as a random network. Finally, we use the Full Strategy Minority Game model, to explicitly calculate some properties of its networks, such as the degree distribution, for the same link definition, and to estimate, from them, the properties of the networks of the Minority Game, obtaining a very good agreement with its measured properties.