Scaling Concepts between Trust and Enforcement

Background

According to Dwyer & Cofta (2008), the socio-cognitive model of trust holds that a trustor makes a decision based on an assessment of cues of evidence about a specific situation and a trustee. A more formal definition is given by Gambretta (1988), and Jøsang, Gray & Kinateder (2003) re-cite it as follows: “trust (or, symmetrically, distrust) is a particular level of the subjective probability with which an agent will perform a particular action, both before (the trustor) can monitor such action (or independently of his capacity of ever to be able to monitor it) and in a context in which it affects (the trustor's) own action” (p. 213). Trust, as the underlying concept for each economic process needs a good understanding before it can be formalised within a specific model and applied to technology. An important requisite for trust is a risk, or having something invested, as Gambetta (1988) remarks. Castelfranchi and Falcone (1998) extend the definition of Gambretta (1988) to include the notion of competence along with predictability. In all these definitions, trust is considered as a subjective notion, that is, it is not per se linked to empirical observation of the trustees’ behaviour. Grandison and Sloman (2000) stress the aspect of contextuality of trust, meaning that the expectable actions of the trustor are conditioned by the world state in which they occur. This is also emphasised in the language of information systems by Yahalom, Klein & Beth (1993).