706 Stewart

Experim ents were conduc ted with resp ect to two classifier system mechanisms: t he bid com pet it ion and th e use of classifier specificity in biddi ng a nd paymen ts. T he experimen ts employed a sim plified classifier system and so may not accurately reflect the behavior of t he standard system. Nevertheless, the resul ts indicated t hat , in general, (1) specificity should not be fac tored into amounts deducted from a classifier 's st rengt h, (2) t he bid compe tit ion does not improve perform ance and does not encourage defaul t hierarchies, and (3) defa.ult hierarchies will form under a somewhat different algorithm than the standard one.