Lim, Ik Soo ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9499-8515 and Masuda, Naoki (2026) To be a truster or not to be: evolutionary dynamics of a symmetric n-player trust game in well-mixed and networked populations. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Systems. ISSN 2168-2216 (Print), 2168-2232 (Online) (In Press) (doi:10.1109/TSMC.2026.3726798)

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Abstract

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 fixed role. To address this limitation, we propose a symmetric N-player Trust Game, in which players alternate between two roles, a common feature of real-world interactions; this framework models situations in which an agent's success in dynamic multi-agent systems depends on their performance across interchangeable roles rather than in a single fixed role. The payoff of the player is defined as the average across their two roles and drives the evolutionary game dynamics. We find that the symmetric N-player Trust Game presents a more challenging social dilemma than the well-studied Public Goods Game: while nonlinear payoffs can promote cooperation in the latter, trust in our proposed game fails to evolve in well-mixed populations regardless of such nonlinearity. In structured populations, nonlinear payoffs, a realistic feature of many biological and social systems, can have strong impacts on the evolution of trust. Unlike existing models confined to linear payoffs, we reveal that the same nonlinearity can yield substantially different outcomes, depending on the nature of the underlying network. Notably, degree-based interventions nearly double the average social welfare, increasing the mean normalised payoff from 0.42 to 0.78 across the tested parameter space. Our results highlight the importance of considering both payoff structures and network topologies in understanding the emergence and maintenance of prosocial behaviours (e.g.,\,trust).

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	evolutionary game theory, evolutionary dynamics, replicator dynamics, trust game, multiplayer game, symmetry, networks
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology Q Science > Q Science (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Engineering & Science Faculty of Engineering & Science > School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences (CMS)
Last Modified:	24 Aug 2026 13:09
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/54294

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