Self-organization behavior in a constrained minority game

Abstract

In the standard minority game, every agent switches to his best strategy in hand at each time step. If only a small number of agents are allowed to switch their strategies at each time step, the population variance of the system plunges. The variance reaches a low value and remains steady for a period of time. Then without any sign it starts to rise abruptly to a high value and then decreases smoothly to the previous low value again. The process of an abrupt rise followed by a gentle decrease repeats again and again but without obvious characteristic length as time goes on. The phenomenon is similar to the collapse of a sand pile with sands being added continuously from the top. We define the scale of collapse of the population variance by the difference of the variance before and after an abrupt rise. We then find that the logarithmic plot of the frequency versus scale of the collapses follows a power law.