Need, greed and noise: competing strategies in a trading model

We study an economic model where agents trade a variety of products by using one of the three competing rules: “need”, “greed” and “noise”. We find that the optimal strategy for any agent depends on both product composition in the overall market and composition of strategies in the market. In particular, a strategy that does best on pairwise competition may easily do much worse when all are present, leading, in some cases, to a “paper, stone, scissors” circular hierarchy.