Payoff-driven migration promotes the evolution of trust in networked populations

Abstract

Establishing and maintaining trustworthy behaviors in large populations of self-interested individuals is a significant problem which received extensive attentions from research fields such as evolutionary biology, economics, sociology and engineering. As a well-known model that captures social trust dilemmas, the -player trust game is adopted to investigate the evolution of trust in groups consisting of investors and trustees. In addition, to model real scenarios in dynamic environments, we introduce a novel migration mechanism, called adaptive environment-benefit-driven migration, which considers the influence of individuals’ payoffs on migration. Through theoretical analysis and Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the migration mechanism on facilitating trust behaviors in the framework of evolutionary game theory. We find that the population density plays a crucial role in establishing trust. Simulation results reveal that trust can be fostered in a dynamic environment influenced by individual migration with the medium vacancy rate. This work significantly contributes to the understanding of mutual trust behaviors in networked social systems from a more realistic perspective.