Evolution of unplanned coordination in a market selection game

This paper examines the evolution of unplanned coordination among independe nt agents in a market selection game, which is a noncooperative repeated ga me with many agents and several markets. Every agent is supposed to simulta neously choose a single market for maximizing its own payoff obtained by se lling its product at the selected market. It is assumed that the market pri ce is determined by the total supply of products. For example, if many agen ts choose a particular market, the market price at that market is low. The point of the market selection is to choose a market that is not chosen by m any other agents. In this paper, game strategies are genetically updated by localized selection and mutation. A new strategy of an agent is probabilis tically selected from its neighbors' strategies by the selection operation or randomly updated by the mutation operation. It is shown that the maximiz ation of each agent's payoff leads to the unplanned coordination of the mar ket selection where the undesired concentration of agents is avoided. The u nplanned coordination is compared with the planned global coordination obta ined by the maximization of the total payoff over all agents.