Quantifying a certain advantage law: minority game with above the rules agents

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing strategic 'above the rules' agents in minority games affects overall system performance, revealing that even few such agents can significantly deteriorate the collective behavior.

Contribution

It provides a computational analysis of the impact of clever agents on minority game dynamics, highlighting phase transition alterations due to their presence.

Findings

Performance degrades with strategic agents

Small fractions of clever agents disrupt phase transitions

Critical concentration leads to loss of standard phases

Abstract

In this work the properties of minority games containing agents which try to winning all the time are studied by means of computational simulations. We have considered several ways of introducing above the rules clever players using ?strategies? which try to outdo the others endowed with statistically equivalent strategies and compared the resulting behaviours of the ensemble. It is shown that by introducing such agents the overall performance of the system gets significantly poorer. While the introduction of a very small fraction of these never-loosing-players may not destroys the unordered / ordered phase transition of the standard minority game we find that even for a low concentration of their presence only a state ?worse? than random coin toss choices sets in. These special agents/players have the role of impurities or vacancies in spin systems and their presence may lead to a critical concentration where the usual phases are washed out.