Abstract
The El Farol Bar Problem presents a coordination problem where agents must independently decide whether or not to utilize a limited resource, a bar. Given a set of decision-making strategies, the agents learn over time which strategies perform better and choose accordingly. We take a unique approach to analyzing the problem by focusing on how the distribution of utilized strategies shifts over time. To emphasize this system behavior, we create an agent-based model with a small number of decision-making strategies for the agents to use. We analyze the problem for when agents are allowed to change strategies and when they are not. The change in distribution over time is tracked, along with overall agent happiness and attendance, then compared. We find that systems with the same strategy set but different distributions tend to perform differently when agents are not allowed to switch from their initial strategy, but gravitate towards an attractor in the strategy space when switching is allowed. We also find that the approach may still work when some of the constraints of the original problem are relaxed.