Introducing Social Issues into a Minority Game by Using an Agent Based Model

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors perturb a Minority Game (MG) with some sociological issues, first of all by implementing a social network among the involved agents, through which they can somehow communicate their decision to a group of “friends”, which is a local subset of those participating the game. Thus, the emergent aggregate behaviour will be very far from that of the original MG; the stress, here, is on the possibility, for an agent, to change her own decision, after getting the information from other n agents. Two different communication protocols among the agents will be examined: the synchronous one and the more realistic asynchronous one. Besides, in some experiments, a memory is introduced, acting as a selection mechanism. Last but not least, some special agents, called Opinion Leaders, are implemented, whose influence over the others is higher than normal, in order to study how this can change the aggregate results.