Economic Modeling of a Trust Network via Positive Collusion and Aspiration Adaptation

Military communities in tactical networks must often maintain high group solidarity based on the trustworthiness of participating individual entities where collaboration is critical to performing team-oriented missions. Group trust is regarded as more important than trust of an individual entity since consensus among or compliance of participating entities with given protocols may significantly affect successful mission completion. This work introduces a game theoretic approach, namely Aoyagi’s game theory on collusion in a dynamic Bertrand oligopoly. This approach improves group trust by using positive collusion encouraging unanimous compliance with a given group protocol. Further, inspired by aspiration theory in social sciences, we adjust the expected system trust threshold level that should be maintained by all participating entities to effectively encourage benign behaviors. The results show that there exist optimal settings (e.g., system trust threshold level) that can maximize group trust level while meeting required system lifetime (survivability).