An evolutionary game model for behavioral gambit of loyalists: Global awareness and risk-aversion

¹ Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Innovazione, Università del Salento - Lecce, Italy
² Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica Ennio De Giorgi, Università del Salento - Lecce, Italy
³ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Lecce - Lecce, Italy

Received: 9 November 2017
Accepted: 2 March 2018

Abstract

We study the phase diagram of a minority game where three classes of agents are present. Two types of agents play a risk-loving game that we model by the standard Snowdrift Game. The behaviour of the third type of agents is coded by indifference with respect to the game at all: their dynamics is designed to account for risk-aversion as an innovative behavioral gambit. From this point of view, the choice of this solitary strategy is enhanced when innovation starts, while is depressed when it becomes the majority option. This implies that the payoff matrix of the game becomes dependent on the global awareness of the agents measured by the relevance of the population of the indifferent players. The resulting dynamics is nontrivial with different kinds of phase transition depending on a few model parameters. The phase diagram is studied on regular as well as complex networks.