The Minority Game is a physicist's attempt to explain market behaviour by the interaction between traders. With a minimal set of ingredients and drastic assumptions, this model reproduces market ecology among different types of traders. Its emphasis is on speculative trading and information flow. The book first describes the philosophy lying behind the conception of the Minority Game in 1997, and includes in particular a discussion about the El Farol bar problem. It then reviews the main steps in later developments, including both the theory and its applications to market phenomena. 'Minority Games' gives a colourful and stylized, but also realistic picture of how financial markets operate.

The economy is examined by the authors as a complex interactive system. The emphasis is on the direct interaction between agents rather than on the indirect and autonomous interaction through the market mechanism. Contributions from economists and physicists emphasise the consequences for aggregate behaviour of the interaction between agents with limited rationality. Models of financial markets which exhibit many of the stylised facts of empirical markets such as bubbles, herd behaviour and long memory are presented. This includes contributions on bargaining, buyer-seller relations, the evolution of economic networks and several aspects of macro-economic behaviour. This book will be of interest to all those interested in the foundations of collective social and economic behaviour and in particular, to those concerned with the dynamics of market behaviour and recent applications of physics to economics.

The Minority Game is a physicist's attempt to explain market behaviour by the interaction between traders. With a minimal set of ingredients and drastic assumptions, this model reproduces market ecology among different types of traders. Its emphasis is on speculative trading and information flow. The book first describes the philosophy lying behind the conception of the Minority Game in 1997, and includes in particular a discussion about the El Farol bar problem. It then reviews the main steps in later developments, including both the theory and its applications to market phenomena. 'Minority Games' gives a colourful and stylized, but also realistic picture of how financial markets operate.