Learning to trust strangers: an evolutionary perspective

Pierre Courtois and Tarik Tazdaït ()
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Tarik Tazdaït: CIRED - centre international de recherche sur l'environnement et le développement - Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - AgroParisTech - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: What if living in a relatively trustworthy society was sufficient to blindly trust strangers? In this paper we interpret generalized trust as a learning process and analyse the trust game paradox in light of the replicator dynamics. Given that trust inevitably implies doubts about others, we assume incomplete information and study the dynamics of trust in buyer-supplier purchase transactions. Considering a world made of "good" and "bad" suppliers, we show that the trust game admits a unique evolutionarily stable strategy: buyers may trust strangers if it is not too risky to do so. Examining the situation where some players may play either as trustor or as trustee we show that this result is robust.

Keywords: evolutionary stable strategy; treshold; trust; incomplete information; replicator dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Published in Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2012, 22 (2), pp.367-383. ⟨10.1007/s00191-011-0247-z⟩

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Journal Article: Learning to trust strangers: an evolutionary perspective (2012)
Working Paper: Learning to trust strangers: an evolutionary perspective (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00715459

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-011-0247-z

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