2016/01/01 by Ulrich Berger, Berger, Ulrich
Social Sciences · #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.57938/3138728f-1b09-40e0-a6be-ada83850c8df
openalex publication_date 2016/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Interpersonal trust is a one-sided social dilemma. Building on the binary trust game, we ask how trust and trustworthiness can evolve in a population where partners are matched randomly and agents sometimes act as trustors and sometimes as trustees. Trustors have the option to costly check a trustee's last action and to condition their behavior on the signal they receive. We show that the resulting population game admits two components of Nash equilibria. Nevertheless, the long-run outcome of an evolutionary social learning process modeled by the best response dynamics is unique. Even if unconditional distrust initially abounds, the trustors' checking option leads trustees to build a reputation for trustworthiness by honoring trust. This invites free-riders among the trustors who save the costs of checking and trust blindly, until it does no longer pay for trustees to behave in a trustworthy manner. This results in cyclical convergence to a mixed equilibrium with behavioral heterogeneity where suspicious checking and blind trusting coexist while unconditional distrust vanishes. (author's abstract)