The original version of the trust game (Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe, 1995) has three essences: two persons, each person taking one role (either trustor or trustee), and a fixed multiplier. In our extended version, we consider N persons, each taking a dual role, and a state-dependent multiplier.

The network-based trust game is a hybridization of both the repeated trust games and the network games. It is outlined as follows. N agents engage in a repeated trust game with T repetitions (T rounds). In each round, each agent has to make a two-stage decision: networking and investment.