Effects of Contrarians in the Minority Game

TL;DR

This paper investigates how introducing contrarians into the Minority Game affects agent success rates, revealing a non-linear relationship and providing analytical insights into different contrarian proportions.

Contribution

It introduces contrarians into the Minority Game and analyzes their impact on success rates, offering both numerical and analytical results for various contrarian fractions.

Findings

Contrarians outperform normal agents at low fractions.

High contrarian fractions disrupt the game's anti-persistent dynamics.

Success rate varies non-monotonically with contrarian proportion.

Abstract

We study the effects of the presence of contrarians in an agent-based model of competing populations. Contrarians are common in societies. These contrarians are agents who deliberately prefer to hold an opinion that is contrary to the prevailing idea of the commons or normal agents. Contrarians are introduced within the context of the Minority Game (MG), which is a binary model for an evolving and adaptive population of agents competing for a limited resource. Results of numerical simulations reveal that the average success rate among the agents depends non-monotonically on the fraction $a_{c}$ of contrarians. For small $a_{c}$, the contrarians systematically outperform the normal agents by avoiding the crowd effect and enhance the overall success rate. For high $a_{c}$, the anti-persistent nature of the MG is disturbed and the few normal agents outperform the contrarians. Qualitative discussion and analytic results for the small $a_{c}$ and high $a_{c}$ regimes are also presented, and the crossover behavior between the two regimes is discussed.