Weighted multi-resource minority games

Abstract

Game theory and its application in multi-agent systems continues to attract a considerable number of scientists and researchers around the globe. Moreover, the need for distributed resource allocation is increasing at a high pace and multi-agent systems are known to be suitable to deal with these problems. In this chapter, we investigate the presence of multiple resources in minority games where each resource can be given a weight (importance). In this context, we investigate different settings of the parameters and how they change the results of the game. In spite of some previous works on multi-resource minority games, we explain why they should be referred as multi-option games. Through exploring various scenarios of multi-resource situations, we take into account two important issues: (i) degree of freedom to choose strategy, and (ii) the effect of resource capacity on the different evaluation criteria. Besides, we introduce a new criterion named resource usage to understand the behavior of the system and the performance of agents in utilizing each resource. We find that although using a single strategy may involve less computation, using different strategies is more effective when employing multiple resources simultaneously. In addition, we investigate the system behavior as the importance of resources are different; we find that by adjusting the weight of resources, it is possible to attract agents towards a particular resource.