Costly reputation building still promotes the collective trust within the networked population

Abstract

Abstract Trust is of vital importance to economic development, social harmony, political stability and cultural succession in the real world, and then understanding how trust emerges and evolves in a selfish population has long been a significant and challenging issue. From the perspective of trustees, we investigate how reputation building and cost for trustees with dynamic adaptive reputation affect the evolution of trust. Trustees can spend specific funds or costs to build or maintain their reputation, which then enhances their own social competitiveness during the trust evolution. Considering the heterogeneity of individual cost, sigmoid function is used to describe the relationship between reputation and cost. It is found that trust and trustworthiness could still emerge and persist even if reputation building is costly. Meanwhile, the moderate level of willingness to build the reputation or the middle reputation cost is more conducive to the evolution of trust, otherwise it could result in the deterioration of trust behaviors among agents. The current results are helpful to illustrate the evolution of trust and cooperation within the networked population.