Minority game with arbitrary cutoffs

We study a model of a competing population of N adaptive agents, with simil ar capabilities, repeatedly deciding whether to attend a bar with an arbitr ary cutoff L. Decisions are based upon past outcomes. The agents are only t old whether the actual attendance is above or below L. For L similar to N/2 , the game reproduces the main features of Challet and Zhang's minority gam e. As L is lowered, however, the mean attendances in different runs tend to divide into two groups. The corresponding standard deviations for these tw o groups are very different. This grouping effect results from the dynamica l feedback governing the game's time-evolution, and is not reproduced if th e agents are fed a random history, (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All right s reserved.