Section: New Results

Herding behavior in a social game

Participants : Guy Fayolle, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes.

The system Ma Micro Planète belongs to the so-called Massively Multi-Player online Role Playing game (MMORPG), its main goal being to incite users to have a sustainable mobility. Two objectives have been pursued.

• Construct an experimental platform to collect data in order to prompt actors of the mobility to share information (open data system).

• See how various mechanisms of a game having an additive effect could modify the transportation requests.

At the heart of the game are community-driven points of interest (POIs), or sites, which have a score that depends on the players activity. The aim of this work is to understand the dynamics of the underlying stochastic process. We analyze in detail its stationary regime in the thermodynamic limit, when the number of players tends to infinity. In particular, for some classes of input sequences and selection policies, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a complete meanfield-like measure, showing off an interesting condensation phenomenon.

The work has been published this year in Queueing Systems [20] .