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Emergence of heterogeneity in a noncompetitive resource allocation problem
Christina Matzke1, Damien Challet
1Bonn Graduate School of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany. christina.matzke@uni-bonn.de
Abstract:
Tuning one's shower in some hotels may turn into a challenging coordination game with imperfect information. The temperature sensitivity increases with the number of agents, making the problem possibly unlearnable. Because there is in practice a finite number of possible tap positions, identical agents are unlikely to reach even approximately their favorite water temperature. We show that a population of agents with homogeneous strategies is evolutionary unstable, which gives insights into the emergence of heterogeneity, the latter being tempting but risky.
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