Minority games and stylized facts

The minority game is a generic model of competing adaptive agents, which is often believed to be a model of financial markets. We discuss to which ext ent this is a reasonable statement and present minimal modifications that m ake this model reproduce stylized facts. The resulting model shows that wit hout speculators, prices follow random walks, and that stylized facts disap pear if enough speculators take into account their market impact. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.