The Effects and Evolution of Implicit Trust in Populations Playing the Iterated Prisoner´s Dilemma

The concept of trust is central to engendering cooperation among autonomous agents. This paper focuses on the topic of trust and how agents may bias their interactions based upon implicit trust. We define implicit trust as that which is conveyed through the utilities of a simple game offer. We introduce this concept of implicit trust and present our motivations for examining this phenomenon. We define a game theoretic framework, including possible strategy sets and a game environment. We outline a series of experiments which illustrate the effects of implicit trust. Finally, we draw conclusions based on the experimental results presented.