The Local Minority Game

Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might contribute to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of these systems. During the last three years one intuitive model, commonly referred to as the Minority Game, has attracted broad attention. Powerful yet simple, the minority game has produced encouraging results which can explain the temporal behaviour of competitive systems. Here we switch the interest to phenomena due to a distribution of the individuals in space. For analyzing these effects we modify the Minority Game and the Local Minority Game is introduced. We study the system both numerically and analytically, using the customary techniques already developped for the ordinary Minority Game.