Between Trust and Performance: Exploring Socio-Economic Mechanisms on Directed Weighted Regular Ring with Agent-Based Modeling

This paper explores the evolution of interaction and cooperation supported by individuals’ changing trust and trustworthiness on directed weighted regular ring though agent-based modeling. This agent-based model integrates fragility of trust, interaction decision, strategy decision, payoff matrix decision, interaction density and information diffusion. Marginal rate of exploitation of original payoff matrix and relative exploitation degree between the original and mutated payoff matrices are stressed in trust updating; influence of observing is introduced via imagined strategy; relation is maintained through relation maintenance strength. The impact of degree of embeddedness in social network, mutation probability of payoff matrix, mutated payoff matrix, proportion of high trust agents and probabilities of information diffusion within neighborhood and among non-neighbors on the sum of number of actual interaction and cooperation of all agents are probed on the base of a baseline simulation, respectively. Under the experimental design and parameter values selection in this paper, it is found that basically as degree of embeddedness in social network, proportion of high trust agents and probability of information diffusion in neighbors increase, as mutation probability of payoff matrix, conflict in mutated payoff matrix and probability of information diffusion in non-neighbors decrease, interaction and cooperation perform better.