Effects of Diversity on Multi-agent Systems: Minority Games

TL;DR

This paper investigates how diversity in initial preferences among agents in large population games like minority games influences their behavior, leading to reduced maladaptation and altered dynamics, with findings supported by simulations.

Contribution

It introduces diversity through random biases in strategies and analyzes its effects on game dynamics, revealing new scaling relations and dynamical behaviors.

Findings

Diversity reduces maladaptive behavior among agents.

Scaling relations depend on diversity for variance and convergence time.

Increased diversity modifies dynamics via kinetic sampling and waiting effects.

Abstract

We consider a version of large population games whose agents compete for resources using strategies with adaptable preferences. The games can be used to model economic markets, ecosystems or distributed control. Diversity of initial preferences of strategies is introduced by randomly assigning biases to the strategies of different agents. We find that diversity among the agents reduces their maladaptive behavior. We find interesting scaling relations with diversity for the variance and other parameters such as the convergence time, the fraction of fickle agents, and the variance of wealth, illustrating their dynamical origin. When diversity increases, the scaling dynamics is modified by kinetic sampling and waiting effects. Analyses yield excellent agreement with simulations.