Agent-Based Simulation of the Trust and Tracing Game for Supply Chains and Networks

This paper describes a multi-agent simulation model of the Trust And Tracing game. The Trust And Tracing game is a gaming simulation for human players, developed as a research tool for data collection on human behaviour in food supply chains with asymmetric information about food quality and food safety. Important issues in the game are opportunistic behaviour (deceit), trust and institutional arrangements for enforcing compliance. The goal is to improve the understanding of human decision making with respect to these issues. To this end multi-agent simulation can be applied to simulate the effect of models of individual decision making in partner selection, negotiation, deceit and trust on system behaviour. The combination of human gaming simulation and multi-agent simulation offers a basis for model refinement in a cycle of validation, experimentation, and formulation of new hypotheses. This paper describes a first round of model formulation and validation. The models presented are validated by a series of experiments performed by the implemented simulation system, of which the outcomes are compared on aggregated level to the outcomes of games played by humans. The experiments cover in a systematic way the important variations in parameter settings possible in the game and in the characteristics of the agents. The simulation results show the same tendencies of behaviour as the observed human games.