Expectations of Fairness and Trust Co-Evolve in Environments of Partial Information

Abstract

When playing one-shot economic games, individuals often blindly trust others, accepting partnerships without any information regarding the trustworthiness of their partner. Consequently, they risk deleterious pacts. Oddly, when individuals do have information about another, they reject partnerships that are not fair, despite the fact that such offers are profitable-individuals costly punish. Why would one reject profitable partnerships on the one hand, but risk unknown offers on the other? Significant research has gone into explaining the contexts where blind trust or costly punishment provides an evolutionary advantage; however, both behaviours are rarely considered in tandem. Here we demonstrate that both behaviours can simultaneously be revenue maximizing. Further, given the plausible condition of partially obscured information and partner choice, trust mediates the generation of costly punishment. This result is important because it demonstrates that the evolutionary viability of trust, fairness, and costly punishment may be linked. The adaptive nature of fairness expectations can best be explained in concert with trust.

Cost-efficient interventions for promoting fairness in the ultimatum game

“…Our future work will examine other asymmetric games with multiple roles, such as the trust and anticipation games, where the bargaining nature is different from the ultimatum game (Gut, 2009, Rauwolf and Bryson, 2018, Zisis et al, 2015, to see how this bargaining factor might affect the way interference needs to be made. We are also interested in how different network structures influence the interference strategies in asymmetric interactions, which has been studied for symmetric games (Cimpeanu et al, 2019).…”

“…This paper contributes to advancing the state-of-the-art by studying cost-efficient external interference in a spatial Ultimatum Game (UG), a popular bargaining game for investigating fair decision making in many disciplines, such as economics and AI/MAS research (Cimpeanu et al, 2021, de Jong and Tuyls, 2011, De Jong et al, 2008, de Melo et al, 2018, Fehr and Schmidt, 1999, Güth et al, 1982, Rauwolf and Bryson, 2018, Teixeira et al, 2021. While there is concern over which quantitative definition of fairness to use in several disciplines, such as algorithmic fairness in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Hutchinson andMitchell, 2019, Mehrabi et al, 2021), the abstract framework of the UG presents an uncontroversial, unique mathematical criterion for measuring fairness.…”

The evolution of trust and trustworthiness

“…A handful of papers have studied the evolution of trust and trustworthiness using the trust game or some variants thereof. However, most of these works focused on well-mixed populations [80][81][82][83][84]. These works typically show that, with no additional mechanisms, such as choice visibility, trust and trustworthiness do not evolve in well-mixed populations.…”

Promoting Fair Proposers, Fair Responders or Both? Cost-Efficient Interference in the Spatial Ultimatum Game

“…Our future work will examine other asymmetric games with multiple roles, such as the trust and anticipation games, where the bargaining nature is different from the ultimatum game (Gut, 2009, Han et al, 2020b, Rauwolf and Bryson, 2018, Zisis et al, 2015, to see how this bargaining factor might affect the way interference needs to be made. We are also interested in how different network structures influence the interference strategies in asymmetric interactions, which has been studied for symmetric games (Cimpeanu et al, 2019).…”

“…This paper contributes to advancing the state-of-the-art by studying cost-efficient external interference in a spatial Ultimatum Game (UG), a popular bargaining game for investigating fair decision making in many disciplines, such as economics and AI/MAS research, (de Jong and Tuyls, 2011, De Jong et al, 2008, de Melo et al, 2018, Fehr and Schmidt, 1999, Güth et al, 1982, Rauwolf and Bryson, 2018. In a standard UG, players have two different roles, proposer and receiver (or responder), with different bargaining powers (See Methods in Section 3 for a detailed description of the game).…”