coevolution of trustful buyers and cooperative sellers in the trust game共同进化的深信不疑的买家和卖家合作信任的游戏.pdf

Coevolution of Trustful Buyers and Cooperative Sellers in the Trust Game Naoki Masuda1,2*, Mitsuhiro Nakamura1 1 Department of Mathematical Informatics, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan, 2 PRESTO, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Kawaguchi, Saitama, Japan Abstract Many online marketplaces enjoy great success. Buyers and sellers in successful markets carry out cooperative transactions even if they do not know each other in advance and a moral hazard exists. An indispensable component that enables cooperation in such social dilemma situations is the reputation system. Under the reputation system, a buyer can avoid transacting with a seller with a bad reputation. A transaction in online marketplaces is better modeled by the trust game than other social dilemma games, including the donation game and the prisoner’s dilemma. In addition, most individuals participate mostly as buyers or sellers; each individual does not play the two roles with equal probability. Although the reputation mechanism is known to be able to remove the moral hazard in games with asymmetric roles, competition between different strategies and population dynamics of such a game are not sufficiently understood. On the other hand, existing models of reputation-based cooperation, also known as indirect reciprocity, are based on the symmetric donation game. We analyze the trust game with two fixed roles, where trustees (i.e., sellers) but not investors (i.e., buyers) possess reputation scores. We study the equilibria and the replicator dynamics of the game. We show that the reputation mechanism enables cooperation between unacquainted buyers and sellers under fairly generous conditions, even when such a cooperative equilibrium coexists with an asocial equilibrium in which buyers do not buy and sellers cheat.