The search for more realistic modeling of financial time series reveals several stylized facts of real markets. In this work we focus on the multifractal properties found in price and index signals. Although the usual Minority Game (MG) models do not exhibit multifractality, we study here one of its variants that does. We show that the nonsynchronous MG models in the nonergodic phase is multifractal and in this sense, together with other stylized facts, constitute a better modeling tool. Using the Structure Function (SF) approach we detected the stationary and the scaling range of the time series generated by the MG model and, from the linear (nonlinear) behavior of the SF we identified the fractal (multifractal) regimes. Finally, using the Wavelet Transform Modulus Maxima (WTMM) technique we obtained its multifractal spectrum width for different dynamical regimes.
We introduce the minority game theory for two kinds of the Korean treasury bond (KTB) in Korean futures exchange markets. Since we discuss numerically the standard deviation and the global efficiency for an arbitrary strategy, our case is found to be approximate to the majority game. Our result presented will be compared with numerical findings for the well-known minority and majority game models.
Price dynamics is analyzed in terms of a model which includes the possibility of effective forces due to trend followers or trend adverse strategies. The method is tested on the data of a minority-majority model and indeed it is capable of reconstructing the prevailing traders' strategies in a given time interval. Then we also analyze real (NYSE) stock-prices dynamics and it is possible to derive an indication for the the ``sentiment'' of the market for time intervals of at least one day.
We solve the dynamics of large spherical Minority Games (MG) in the presence of non-negligible time dependent external contributions to the overall market bid. The latter represent the actions of market regulators, or other major natural or political events that impact on the market. In contrast to non-spherical MGs, the spherical formulation allows one to derive closed dynamical order parameter equations in explicit form and work out the market's response to such events fully analytically. We focus on a comparison between the response to stationary versus oscillating market interventions, and…
A brief review is given of the minority game, an idealized model stimulated by a market of speculative agents, and its complex many-body behaviour. Particular consideration is given to analytic results for the model rather than discussions of its relevance in real-world situations.
We study analytically and numerically Minority Games in which agents may invest in different assets (or markets), considering both the canonical and the grand-canonical versions. We find that the likelihood of agents trading in a given asset depends on the relative amount of information available in that market. More specifically, in the canonical game players play preferentially in the stock with less information. The same holds in the grand canonical game when agents have positive incentives to trade, whereas when agents payoff are solely related to their speculative ability they display a l…
In this paper we study the continuum time dynamics of a stock in a market where agents behavior is modeled by a Minority Game and a Grand Canonical Minority Game. The dynamics derived is a generalized geometric Brownian motion; from the Black & Scholes formula the calibration of both the Minority Game and the Grand Canonical Minority Game, by means of their characteristic parameters, is performed. We conclude that for both games the asymmetric phase with characteristic parameters close to critical ones is coherent with options implied volatility market.
The Interactive Minority Game (IMG) is an online version of the traditional Minority Game in which human players can enter into competition with the traditional computer-controlled agents. Through the rich (and, importantly, analytically understood) behaviour of the MG, we can explore humans' behaviour in different kinds of market--crowded, efficient, critical--with a high degree of control. To make the game easily understandable even to those who are encountering it for the first time, we have presented the game with a rather simplified interface; in this working paper we explain the underlyi…
We introduce a simple extension of the minority game in which the market rewards contrarian (resp. trend-following) strategies when it is far from (resp. close to) efficiency. The model displays a smooth crossover from a regime where contrarians dominate to one where trend-followers dominate. In the intermediate phase, the stationary state is characterized by non-Gaussian features as well as by the formation of sustained trends and bubbles.
In mix-game which is an extension of minority game, there are two groups of agents; group1 plays the majority game, but the group2 plays the minority game. This paper studies the change of the average winnings of agents and volatilities vs. the change of mixture of agents in mix-game model. It finds that the correlations between the average winnings of agents and the mean of local volatilities are different with different combinations of agent memory length when the proportion of agents in group 1 increases. This study result suggests that memory length of agents in group1 be smaller than that…
In this paper I give a brief introduction to a family of simple but non-trivial models designed to increase our understanding of collective processes in markets, the so-called Minority Games, and their non-equilibrium statistical mathematical analysis. Since the most commonly studied members of this family define disordered stochastic processes without detailed balance, the canonical technique for finding exact solutions is found to be generating functional analysis a la De Dominicis, as originally developed in the spin-glass community.
The dynamics of minority games with agents trading on different time scales is studied via dynamical mean-field theory. We analyze the case where the agents' decision-making process is deterministic and its stochastic generalization with finite heterogeneous learning rates. In each case, we characterize the macroscopic properties of the steady states resulting from different frequency and learning rate distributions and calculate the corresponding phase diagrams. Finally, the different roles played by regular and occasional traders, as well as their impact on the system's global efficiency, ar…
Generalization of the minority game to more than one market is considered. At each time step every agent chooses one of its strategies and acts on the market related to this strategy. If the payoff function allows for strong fluctuation of utility then market occupancies become inhomogeneous with preference given to this market where the fluctuation occured first. There exists a critical size of agent population above which agents on bigger market behave collectively. In this regime there always exists a history of decisions for which all agents on a bigger market react identically.
We solve the dynamics of the on-line minority game, with general types of decision noise, using generating functional techniques a la De Dominicis and the temporal regularization procedure of Bedeaux et al. The result is a macroscopic dynamical theory in the form of closed equations for correlation- and response functions defined via an effective continuous-time single-trader process, which are exact in both the ergodic and in the non-ergodic regime of the minority game. Our solution also explains why, although one cannot formally truncate the Kramers-Moyal expansion of the process after the F…
We study the dynamics of the `batch' minority game with market-impact correction using generating functional techniques to carry out the quenched disorder average. We find that the assumption of weak long-term memory, which one usually makes in order to calculate ergodic stationary states, breaks down when the persistent autocorrelation becomes larger than c_c=0.772... We show that this condition, remarkably, coincides with the AT-line found in an earlier static calculation. This result suggests a new scenario for ergodicity breaking in disordered systems.
Using the Minority Game model we study a broad spectrum of problems of market mechanism. We study the role of different types of agents: producers, speculators as well as noise traders. The central issue here is the information flow : producers feed in the information whereas speculators make it away. How well each agent fares in the common game depends on the market conditions, as well as their sophistication. Sometimes there is much to gain with little effort, sometimes great effort virtually brings no more incremental gain. Market impact is shown to play also an important role, a strategy s…
We propose a new model of minority game with so-called smart agents such that the standard deviation and the total loss in this model reach the theoretical minimum values in the limit of long time. The smart agents use trail and error method to make a choice but bring global optimization to the system, which suggests that the economic systems may have the ability to self-organize into a highly optimized state by agents who are forced to make decisions based on inductive thinking for their limited knowledge and capabilities. When other kinds of agents are also present, the experimental results …
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 extend this is a reasonable statement, and present minimal modifications that make this model reproduce stylized facts. The resulting model shows that without speculators, prices follow random walks, and that stylized facts disappear if enough speculators take into account their market impact.
We show that the introduction of Tobin taxes in agent-based models of currency markets can lead to a reduction of speculative trading and reduce the magnitude of exchange rate fluctuations at intermediate tax rates. In this regime revenues for the market maker obtained from speculators are maximal. We here focus on Minority Game models of markets, which are accessible by exact techniques from statistical mechanics. Results are supported by computer simulations. Our findings suggest that at finite systems sizes the effect is most pronounced in a critical region around the phase transition of th…
The existence of a phase transition with diverging susceptibility in batch Minority Games (MGs) is the mark of informationally efficient regimes and is linked to the specifics of the agents' learning rules. Here we study how the standard scenario is affected in a mixed population game in which agents with the `optimal' learning rule (i.e. the one leading to efficiency) coexist with ones whose adaptive dynamics is sub-optimal. Our generic finding is that any non-vanishing intensive fraction of optimal agents guarantees the existence of an efficient phase. Specifically, we calculate the dependen…
We review the recent approaches to modelling financial markets based on multi-agent systems. After a brief summary of the basic stylised facts observed in real-market time-series we discuss some simple agent-based systems which are currently used to model financial markets. One of the most prominent examples is here the Minority Game (MG), which we address in some more detail. After a brief discussion of its basic setup and general phenomenology we summarise the main findings of the statistical mechanics analysis and discuss the emergence of stylised facts in extensions of the MG near their ph…
It is shown how the generating functional method of De Dominicis can be used to solve the dynamics of the original version of the minority game (MG), in which agents observe real as opposed to fake market histories. Here one again finds exact closed equations for correlation and response functions, but now these are defined in terms of two connected effective non-Markovian stochastic processes: a single effective agent equation similar to that of the `fake' history models, and a second effective equation for the overall market bid itself (the latter is absent in `fake' history models). The res…
We study a variation of the minority game. There are N agents. Each has to choose between one of two alternatives everyday, and there is reward to each member of the smaller group. The agents cannot communicate with each other, but try to guess the choice others will make, based only the past history of number of people choosing the two alternatives. We describe a simple probabilistic strategy using which the agents acting independently, can still maximize the average number of people benefitting every day. The strategy leads to a very efficient utilization of resources, and the average deviat…
We study minority games in efficient regime. By incorporating the utility function and aggregating agents with similar strategies we develop an effective mesoscale notion of state of the game. Using this approach, the game can be represented as a Markov process with substantially reduced number of states with explicitly computable probabilities. For any payoff, the finiteness of the number of states is proved. Interesting features of an extensive random variable, called aggregated demand, viz. its strong inhomogeneity and presence of patterns in time, can be easily interpreted. Using Markov th…
We present a comprehensive study of utility function of the minority game in its efficient regime. We develop an effective description of state of the game. For the payoff function $g(x)=\sgn (x)$ we explicitly represent the game as the Markov process and prove the finitness of number of states. We also demonstrate boundedness of the utility function. Using these facts we can explain all interesting observable features of the aggregated demand: appearance of strong fluctuations, their periodicity and existence of prefered levels. For another payoff, $g(x)=x$, the number of states is still fini…
The Minority Game framework was recently generalized to account for the possibility that agents adapt not only through strategy selection but also by diversifying their response according to the kind of dynamical regime, or the risk, they perceive. Here we study the effects of this mechanism in different information structures. We show that both the stationary macroscopic properties and the dynamical features depend strongly on whether the information supplied to the system is exogenous (`random') or endogenous (`real'). In particular, in the latter case one observes that a small amount of her…
In this paper the extended model of Minority game (MG), incorporating variable number of agents and therefore called Grand Canonical, is used for prediction. We proved that the best MG-based predictor is constituted by a tremendously degenerated system, when only one agent is involved. The prediction is the most efficient if the agent is equipped with all strategies from the Full Strategy Space. Each of these filters is evaluated and, in each step, the best one is chosen. Despite the casual simplicity of the method its usefulness is invaluable in many cases including real problems. The signifi…
We propose an analytically tractable variation of the minority game in which rational agents use probabilistic strategies. In our model, $N$ agents choose between two alternatives repeatedly, and those who are in the minority get a pay-off 1, others zero. The agents optimize the expectation value of their discounted future pay-off, the discount parameter being $λ$. We propose an alternative to the standard Nash equilibrium, called co-action equilibrium, which gives higher expected pay-off for all agents. The optimal choice of probabilities of different actions are determined exactly in terms o…
We use the Minority Game as a testing frame for the problem of the emergence of diversity in socio-economic systems. For the MG with heterogeneous impacts, we show that the direct generalization of the usual agents' profit does not fit some real-world situations. As a typical example we use the traffic formulation of the MG. Taking into account vehicles of various lengths it can easily happen that one of the roads is crowded by a few long trucks and the other contains more drivers but still is less covered by vehicles. Most drivers are in the shorter queue, so the majority win. To describe suc…
We present and study a Minority Game based model of a financial market where adaptive agents -- the speculators -- interact with deterministic agents -- called producers. Speculators trade only if they detect predictable patterns which grant them a positive gain. Indeed the average number of active speculators grows with the amount of information that producers inject into the market. Transitions between equilibrium and out of equilibrium behavior are observed when the relative number of speculators to the complexity of information or to the number of producers are changed. When the system is …
Using virtual stock markets with artificial interacting software investors, aka agent-based models (ABMs), we present a method to reverse engineer real-world financial time series. We model financial markets as made of a large number of interacting boundedly rational agents. By optimizing the similarity between the actual data and that generated by the reconstructed virtual stock market, we obtain parameters and strategies, which reveal some of the inner workings of the target stock market. We validate our approach by out-of-sample predictions of directional moves of the Nasdaq Composite Index…
In this paper, we present a simple stock market model (the market game) which incorporates, as ab initio dynamics delayed majority dynamics, according to which agents (with heterogeneous strategies and price expectations) are rewarded if their actions at time t are the actions of the majority of agents at time t+1. We observe that for a range of parameter settings, minority dynamics are dynamically induced in this game, despite the fact that they are not introduced ab initio. Central to the emergence of minority dynamics is the introduction of the notion of price expectations for the agents. T…
We study the market impact of a meta-order in the framework of the Minority Game. This amounts to studying the response of the market when introducing a trader who buys or sells a fixed amount h for a finite time T. This perturbation introduces statistical arbitrages that traders exploit by adapting their trading strategies. The market impact depends on the nature of the stationary state: We find that the permanent impact is zero in the unpredictable (information efficient) phase, while in the predictable phase it is non-zero and grows linearly with the size of the meta-order. This establishes…
This paper studies the correlations of the average winnings of agents and the volatilities of systems based on mix-game model which is an extension of minority game (MG). In mix-game, there are two groups of agents; group1 plays the majority game, but the group2 plays the minority game. The results show that the correlations between the average winnings of agents and the mean of local volatilities are different with different combinations of agents' memory lengths when the proportion of agents in group1 increases. The average winnings of agents can represent the average individual performance …
We address the question of market efficiency using the Minority Game (MG) model. First we show that removing unrealistic features of the MG leads to models which reproduce a scaling behavior close to what is observed in real markets. In particular we find that i) fat tails and clustered volatility arise at the phase transition point and that ii) the crossover to random walk behavior of prices is a finite size effect. This, on one hand, suggests that markets operate close to criticality, where the market is marginally efficient. On the other it allows one to measure the distance from criticalit…
The minority game (MG) model introduced recently provides promising insights into the understanding of the evolution of prices, indices and rates in the financial markets. In this paper we perform a time series analysis of the model employing tools from statistics, dynamical systems theory and stochastic processes. Using benchmark systems and a financial index for comparison, several conclusions are obtained about the generating mechanism for this kind of evolut ion. The motion is deterministic, driven by occasional random external perturbation. When the interval between two successive perturb…
Using generating functional and replica techniques, respectively, we study the dynamics and statics of a spherical Minority Game (MG), which in contrast with a spherical MG previously presented in J.Phys A: Math. Gen. 36 11159 (2003) displays a phase with broken ergodicity and dependence of the macroscopic stationary state on initial conditions. The model thus bears more similarity with the original MG. Still, all order parameters including the volatility can computed in the ergodic phases without making any approximations. We also study the effects of market impact correction on the phase dia…
The \$-Game was recently introduced as an extension of the Minority Game. In this paper we compare this model with the well know Minority Game and the Majority Game models. Due to the inter-temporal nature of the market payoff, we introduce a two step transaction with single and mixed group of interacting traders. When the population is composed of two different group of \$-traders, they show an anti-imitative behavior. However, when they interact with minority or majority players the \$-population imitates the usual behavior of these players. Finally we discuss how these models contribute to …
We use the cavity method from statistical physics for analyzing the transient and stationary dynamics of a minority game that is played by agents performing market arbitrage. On the level of linear response the method allows to include the reaction of the market to individual actions of the agents as well as the reaction of the agents to individual information items of the market. This way we derive a self-consistent solution to the minority game. In particular we analyze the impact of general nonlinear price functions on the amount of arbitrage if noise from external fluctuations is present. …
We study the behavior of simple models for financial markets with widely spread frequency either in the trading activity of agents or in the occurrence of basic events. The generic picture of a phase transition between information efficient and inefficient markets still persists even when agents trade on widely spread time-scales. We derive analytically the dependence of the critical threshold on the distribution of time-scales. We also address the issue of market efficiency as a function of frequency. In an inefficient market we find that the size of arbitrage opportunities is inversely propo…
We study the dynamics of a version of the batch minority game, with random external information and with different types of inhomogeneous decision noise (additive and multiplicative), using generating functional techniques à la De Dominicis. The control parameters in this model are the ratio $α=p/N$ of the number $p$ of possible values for the external information over the number $N$ of trading agents, and the statistical properties of the agents' decision noise parameters. The presence of decision noise is found to have the general effect of damping macroscopic oscillations, which explains wh…
We study the dynamics of the batch minority game, with random external information, using generating functional techniques a la De Dominicis. The relevant control parameter in this model is the ratio $α=p/N$ of the number $p$ of possible values for the external information over the number $N$ of trading agents. In the limit $N\to\infty$ we calculate the location $α_c$ of the phase transition (signaling the onset of anomalous response), and solve the statics for $α>α_c$ exactly. The temporal correlations in global market fluctuations turn out not to decay to zero for infinitely widely separated…
We discuss a simple model based on the Minority Game which reproduces the main stylized facts of anomalous fluctuations in finance. We present the analytic solution of the model in the thermodynamic limit and show that stylized facts arise only close to a line of critical points with non-trivial properties. By a simple argument, we show that, in Minority Games, the emergence of critical fluctuations close to the phase transition is governed by the interplay between the signal to noise ratio and the system size. These results provide a clear and consistent picture of financial markets as critic…
