Overcoming mistrust

Trust is often held to promote cooperation, but mistrust can hinder it. Thi s article looks at how trust can be built through strategic interaction. I formalize the common intuition that trust needs to be built through small i nitial cooperative gestures. These gestures are shown to overcome mistrust and facilitate cooperation in an n-person social dilemma game. The model le nds support to the idea that trust can be a product of rational strategic i nteraction. I then extend the result in a related model that shows how trus t can arise between nonaltruistic actors in iterated settings.