Community Enforcement and the Emergence of Trust

In this paper, the link between community enforcement and co-operation in environments where trust is required is investigated. For this purpose, an assymetric trust game in which peer-to-peer sanctioning mechanisms are available is considered. Firstly, the outcome of this game is characterised in terms of the structure of incentives and the trustees' behavioural dispositions to sanction deviant peers. Subsequently, within a payoff-dependant imitation framework, the interaction between trusters and trustees is modelled as a two-population recurrent asymmetric game where both a) the evolution of a social norm, which enforces trust honouring within the trustees' community and b) the emergence of trust between-communities are analysed as inter-dependant processes. Provided that the sanctioning mechanism is efficient enough, and that the initial group reputation is high enough, (honoured) trust will evolve and become a stable outcome