Emerging mutual assurance: a dynamic model of team-reasoning

Game theory’s elegance has made it the tool of choice for the mathematical arm of micro economics, but it faces serious problems when tasked with explaining cooperative behavior in some situations. In those situations, players seem to adopt some form of “team reasoning”, where the good of the team is put above individual incentives. The question of how team reasoning comes about in a group of individuals is still an open one. Here, we make the assumption that trust in other members of the team is the main factor that drives the behavior of each player. We explore the consequences of this assumption using a simple agent-based model where agents are playing a public good games and learn to trust each other (or not) over time.