The Distribution of People to Resources in a Networked Multi-player Environment

We have developed an experimental platform that allows a large number of human participants to interact in real-time within a common virtual world. Within this environment, human participants foraged for resources distributed in two pools. In addition to varying the relative replenishment rates for the two resources (50-50, 65-35, 80-20), we manipulated whether participants could see each other and the entire food distribution, or had their vision restricted to food at their own location. Two empirical violations of optimal distributions of participants were found. First, there was a systematic underutilization of the more preponderant resource. Second, there were oscillations in the harvesting rate of the resources in a pool across time, revealed by a Fourier analysis with prominent power in the range of 50 seconds per cycle. These suboptimalities were more prevalent when participants had no knowledge of other participants or the complete food distribution. Individual participant knowledge thus affects the efficiency with which a population of participants harvests resources.