A Theatre Attendance Model

In this manuscript, the author proposes a model that constitutes a generalization of the El Farol Bar problem. In this model, in each period, each one of the n agents decides the arrival time at a theatre with free entry in which there are k (k<n) seats. Each individual wants to minimize the waiting time (before the beginning of the show) but prefers to assist to the show comfortably seated. The author introduces a utility function that takes into account these aspects, in which also agents’ heterogeneity, in terms of different patience or comfort preferences, is considered. The author examines some possible approaches to this problem, and provides a new inductive reasoning modeling for a simplified version of this Theatre Attendance model, according to which each agent decides the arrival time at the theatre in a certain period by looking at the outcome of the previous round.