In the evolutionary minority game, agents are allowed to evolve their strategies (“mutate”) based on past experience. We explore the dependence of the system’s global behavior on the response time and the mutation threshold of the agents. We find that the precise values of these parameters determine if the strategy distribution of the population has a $\mathsf{U}$ shape, inverse $\mathsf{U}$ shape, or $\mathsf{W}$ shape. It is shown that in a free society (market), highly adaptive agents (with short response times) perform best. In addition, “patient” agents (with high mutation thresholds) outperform “nervous” ones.

• Received 25 January 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.69.066122