Reputation Based Trust In Human-Agent Teamwork Without Explicit Coordination

Abstract

Interacting with strangers and agents through computer networks has become a routine aspect of our daily lives. In such environments, reputation plays a critical role in determining our future interactions and satisfaction derived from them. This paper empirically investigates the effects of agent reputation on humantrust in andbehavior towards peer'' level agent teammates over repeated interactions. We developed a team coordination game, the Game of Trust, in which a human player and an agent player repeatedly cooperate to complete team tasks without prior assignment of subtasks. Before the game begins, the agent player is introduced with either positive or negative reputation to the human player. The effects of agent reputation are evaluated by performing an extensive set of controlled experiments with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace. We collect both teamwork performance data as well as surveys to gauge participants' trust in their agent teammates. The empirical results show that positive (negative) agent reputation led to greater (lower) human trust in agent teammates. Moreover, the interplay between the game expertise and expectation from agent teammate significantly affected the influence of reputation. These findings enhance our understanding of changes in human trust with respect to agent reputation towards achieving successful human-agent teamwork.