Learning to trust, learning to be trustworthy

Ulrich Berger

No 212, Department of Economics Working Paper Series from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Abstract: 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)

Keywords: trust game; evolutionary game theory; reputation; best response dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-mic and nep-soc
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Working Paper: Learning to trust, learning to be trustworthy (2016)
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