The Cognitive Foundations of Economic Exchange: A Modular Framework Grounded in Behavioral Evidence

A key challenge in multi-agent AI is modeling social cooperation under realistic behavioral constraints. Many foundational concepts in economics and ethics such as "trust" or "morality" are often defined informally, without operational criteria or cognitive grounding, which limits their testability and implementation in artificial agents. Drawing on converging empirical evidence from primate behavior, infant cognition, and economic anthropology, we propose a conceptual framework composed of three cognitively minimal mechanisms: individual recognition, reciprocal credence, and cost return sensitivity. This framework reframes trust as a graded cognitive expectation, providing a simulateable basis for reciprocal exchange in artificial agents, and enabling the bottom-up emergence of scalable cooperation and institutional dynamics.