Multi-market minority game: breaking the symmetry of choice

TL;DR

This paper extends the minority game to multiple markets, revealing how agents' collective behavior and market preferences emerge based on utility fluctuations and population size, leading to symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-market minority game model and analyzes how utility fluctuations influence market dominance and agent coordination.

Findings

Market occupancies become inhomogeneous due to utility fluctuations.

A critical population size triggers collective behavior on larger markets.

Existence of decision histories where all agents on a bigger market react identically.

Abstract

Generalization of the minority game to more than one market is considered. At each time step every agent chooses one of its strategies and acts on the market related to this strategy. If the payoff function allows for strong fluctuation of utility then market occupancies become inhomogeneous with preference given to this market where the fluctuation occured first. There exists a critical size of agent population above which agents on bigger market behave collectively. In this regime there always exists a history of decisions for which all agents on a bigger market react identically.