El Farol Bar problem

The El Farol Bar problem is a game theory problem in which a fixed population decides each Thursday whether to go to a bar that is fun only when less than 60% of the population attends. Everyone must decide at once without knowing others' choices, and the article says a deterministic symmetric strategy is guaranteed to fail, since a predicted empty bar fills up and a predicted crowded bar empties. It says a probabilistic mixed strategy does better and that the single-stage problem has a unique symmetric Nash equilibrium mixed strategy. The problem is named after a bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and was created in 1994 by W. Brian Arthur, though B. A. Huberman and T. Hogg formulated and solved it under another name six years earlier.