2024/11/22 by Ik Soo Lim, Naoki Masuda, Lim, Ik Soo +1 · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Game Theory and Applications #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2411.14845
openalex publication_date 2024/11/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.