Evolutionary Minority Games: the benefits of imitation

TL;DR

This paper explores how slight modifications to evolutionary Minority Games enhance population segregation and robustness, especially when strategies with higher fitness are favored, extending to multiple choices and different stochastic strategies.

Contribution

It demonstrates that favoring strategies with above-average fitness intensifies segregation in evolutionary Minority Games and generalizes these effects to multiple choices and other stochastic dynamics.

Findings

Segregation becomes more pronounced with fitness-based strategy frequency.

Effects extend to games with more than two choices.

Robustness of segregation increases under modified dynamics.

Abstract

In the original Evolutionary Minority Game, a segregation into two populations with opposing preferences is observed under many circumstances. We show that this segregation becomes more pronounced and more robust if the dynamics are changed slightly, such that strategies with above-average fitness become more frequent. Similar effects occur also for a generalization of the EMG to more than two choices, and for evolutionary dynamics of a different stochastic strategy for the Minority Game.