Wayward agents in a commuting scenario (personalities in the minority game)

In our daily lives we often have to face binary decisions where we seek to take the minority´s choice, e.g., in traffic scenarios where we have to choose between similar alternative routes. We have studied agent coordination mechanisms in a binary decision model introduced in the literature, the minority game (Challet et al. (1998)). Extending this model, we introduced personalities which model certain types of human behaviour. Different populations of these personalities were simulated. It was found that there is one personality which performs better than the average: the wayward personality. We also extended the concept of Hamming distance to account for our personalities; this notion is useful for qualitatively explaining or predicting results. Our work gives insights into the impact of commuters´ behaviours and it addresses relegated issues in traditional traffic simulation