Eur. Phys. J. B 71, 573-577 (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2009-00312-3

Structure-preserving desynchronization of minority games

¹ Département de physique, Université de Fribourg, Pérolles, 1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
² ISI Foundation, Vialle Settimio Severo 65, 14011 Turin, Italy
³ The Racah Institute of Physics, Hebrew University, 91905 Jerusalem, Israel

Corresponding author: ^a damien.challet@unifr.ch

Received: 14 January 2009
Revised: 23 June 2009
Published online: 17 September 2009

Abstract

Perfect synchronicity in N-player games is a useful theoretical dream, but communication delays are inevitable and may result in asynchronous interactions. Some systems such as financial markets are asynchronous by design, and yet most theoretical models assume perfectly synchronized actions. We propose a general method to transform standard models of adaptive agents into asynchronous systems while preserving their global structure under some conditions. Using the minority game as an example, we find that the phase and fluctuations structure of the standard game subsists even in maximally asynchronous deterministic case, but that it disappears if too much stochasticity is added to the temporal structure of interaction. Allowing for heterogeneous communication speeds and activity patterns gives rise to a new information ecology that we study in details.