Stochastic Evolutionary Dynamics of Trust Games with Asymmetric Parameters

Abstract

Trusting in others and reciprocating that trust with trustworthy actions are crucial to successful and prosperous societies. The Trust Game has been widely used to quantitatively study trust and trustworthiness, involving a sequential exchange between an investor and a trustee. The deterministic evolutionary game theory predicts no trust and no trustworthiness whereas the behavioural experiments with the one-shot anonymous Trust Game show that people substantially trust and respond trustworthily. To explain these discrepancies, previous works often turn to additional mechanisms, which are borrowed from other games such as Prisoner's Dilemma. Although these mechanisms lead to the evolution of trust and trustworthiness to an extent, the optimal or the most common strategy often involves no trustworthiness. In this paper, we study the impact of asymmetric demographic parameters (e.g. different population sizes) on game dynamics of the Trust Game. We show that, in weak-mutation limit, stochastic evolutionary dynamics with the asymmetric parameters can lead to the evolution of high trust and high trustworthiness without any additional mechanisms in well-mixed finite populations. Even full trust and near full trustworthiness can be the most common strategy. These results are qualitatively different from those of the previous works. Our results thereby demonstrate rich evolutionary dynamics of the asymmetric Trust Game.

17 pages, 15 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Conditional investment strategy in evolutionary trust games with repeated group interactions
• To Trust or Not to Trust: Evolutionary Dynamics of an Asymmetric N-player Trust Game
• Evolution of trust in a hierarchical population with punishing investors
• A Synergy of Institutional Incentives and Networked Structures in Evolutionary Game Dynamics of Multi-agent Systems
• Evolution of trust in structured populations
• Inter-role reciprocity in evolutionary trust game on square lattices