Long-Term vs. Short-Term Strategy in the Game of Monopoly

Abstract

We use a computer model to analyze and compare a variety of strategic paradigms in the game of Monopoly®, with an emphasis on strategies that can be implemented by humans.

The strategies that we consider can be divided into two categories: dynamic and static. Dynamic strategies seek to maximize short-term gains by analyzing the current state of the board. Static strategies, by contrast, work toward fixed, long-term goals determined by rankings of the property groups. We first use hill-climbing on a graph and a ranking scheme based on the Google Page Rank algorithm to optimize static strategy. We then conduct head-to-head competitions between our best static strategies, our dynamic strategy, and static strategies suggested by results from other papers, and use the results to produce a ranking of all of these strategies. We also use a blended static/dynamic strategy to show that it is seldom a good idea to depart from a strong static strategy, even for potentially large short-term gains.

Keywords: Hill-climbing on graphs, optimization,Page Rank algorithm, combinatorial games