Evolutionary minority games with small-world interactions

In the evolutionary minority game (EMG), agents compete for a limited resource and are rewarded if they correctly select the minority behaviour. At each time step, agents make their decision based on the aggregate history of past moves and an internal parameter-the probability that the individual follows the given strategy. In this study, the effects of strategic imitation among agents are examined. Here, I combine and extend previous work using local information transmission mechanisms to promote coordination in the population. Extensive numerical simulations using different network architectures, ranging from regular lattices to random networks, are used to investigate the population dynamics. The results suggest that agents sharing information in small-world networks can coordinate their behaviour more effectively than agents playing the standard EMG. However, both the network re-wiring probability and level of imitation significantly impact on performance. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.