To Be a Truster or Not to Be: Evolutionary Dynamics of a Symmetric N-Player Trust Game in Well-Mixed and Networked Populations

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lim, Ik Soo, Masuda, Naoki
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909617248796672
author Lim, Ik Soo
Masuda, Naoki
author_facet Lim, Ik Soo
Masuda, Naoki
contents Trust and reciprocation of it form the foundation of economic, social and other interactions. While the Trust Game is widely used to study these concepts for interactions between two players, often alternating different roles (i.e., investor and trustee), its extensions to multi-player scenarios have been restricted to instances where players assume only one role. We propose a symmetric N-player Trust Game, in which players alternate between two roles, and the payoff of the player is defined as the average across their two roles and drives the evolutionary game dynamics. We find that prosocial strategies are harder to evolve with the present symmetric N-player Trust Game than with the Public Goods Game, which is well studied. In particular, trust fails to evolve regardless of payoff function nonlinearity in well-mixed populations in the case of the symmetric N-player trust game. In structured populations, nonlinear payoffs can have strong impacts on the evolution of trust. The same nonlinearity can yield substantially different outcomes, depending on the nature of the underlying network. Our results highlight the importance of considering both payoff structures and network topologies in understanding the emergence and maintenance of prosocial behaviours.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_14845
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Be a Truster or Not to Be: Evolutionary Dynamics of a Symmetric N-Player Trust Game in Well-Mixed and Networked Populations
Lim, Ik Soo
Masuda, Naoki
Physics and Society
Computer Science and Game Theory
Populations and Evolution
Trust and reciprocation of it form the foundation of economic, social and other interactions. While the Trust Game is widely used to study these concepts for interactions between two players, often alternating different roles (i.e., investor and trustee), its extensions to multi-player scenarios have been restricted to instances where players assume only one role. We propose a symmetric N-player Trust Game, in which players alternate between two roles, and the payoff of the player is defined as the average across their two roles and drives the evolutionary game dynamics. We find that prosocial strategies are harder to evolve with the present symmetric N-player Trust Game than with the Public Goods Game, which is well studied. In particular, trust fails to evolve regardless of payoff function nonlinearity in well-mixed populations in the case of the symmetric N-player trust game. In structured populations, nonlinear payoffs can have strong impacts on the evolution of trust. The same nonlinearity can yield substantially different outcomes, depending on the nature of the underlying network. Our results highlight the importance of considering both payoff structures and network topologies in understanding the emergence and maintenance of prosocial behaviours.
title To Be a Truster or Not to Be: Evolutionary Dynamics of a Symmetric N-Player Trust Game in Well-Mixed and Networked Populations
topic Physics and Society
Computer Science and Game Theory
Populations and Evolution
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.14845