El Farol Revisited

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the collective behavior in the El Farol bar problem, focusing on how external comfort levels influence attendance patterns and their convergence to perceived thresholds.

Contribution

It offers a new interpretation of attendance convergence, emphasizing the role of perceived thresholds over actual ones in agent behavior.

Findings

Attendance mean and variance depend strongly on comfort level

Mean attendance tends to converge to perceived rather than actual threshold

Behavioral interpretation of attendance dynamics is proposed

Abstract

This article is concerned with the global behavior of agents in the El Farol bar problem. In particular, we discuss the global attendance in terms of its mean and variance, and show that there is a strong dependence of both on the externally imposed comfort level. We present a possible interpretation for the observed behavior, and propose that the mean attendance converges to the perceived threshold value as opposed to the actually imposed one.