Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Are trust and risk important in consumers' electronic commerce purchasing decisions? What are the antecedents of trust and risk in this context? How do trust and risk affect an Internet consumer's purchasing decision? To answer these questions, we i) develop a theoretical framework describing the trust-based decision-making process a consumer uses when making a purchase from a given site, ii) test the proposed model using a Structural Equation Modeling technique on Internet consumer purchasing behavior data collected via a Web survey, and iii) consider the implications of the model. The results of the study show that Internet consumers' trust and perceived risk have strong impacts on their purchasing decisions. Consumer disposition to trust, reputation, privacy concerns, security concerns, the information quality of the Website, and the company's reputation, have strong effects on Internet consumers' trust in the Website. Interestingly, the presence of a third-party seal did not strongly influence consumers' trust.

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A trust-based consumer decision-making model in electronic commerce: The role of trust, perceived risk, and their antecedents

Trust is a judgement of unquestionable utility — as humans we use it every day of our lives. However, trust has suffered from an imperfect understanding, a plethora of definitions, and informal use in the literature and in everyday life. It is common to say “I trust you,” but what does that mean? This thesis provides a clarification of trust. We present a formalism for trust which provides us with a tool for precise discussion. The formalism is implementable: it can be embedded in an artificial agent, enabling the agent to make trust-based decisions. Its applicability in the domain of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is raised. The thesis presents a testbed populated by simple trusting agents which substantiates the utility of the formalism. The formalism provides a step in the direction of a proper understanding and definition of human trust. A contribution of the thesis is its detailed exploration of the possibilities of future work in the area.

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Formalising Trust as a Computational Concept

At any given time, the stability of a community depends on the right balance of trust and distrust. Furthermore, we face information overload, increased uncertainty and risk taking as a prominent feature of modern living. As members of society, we cope with these complexities and uncertainties by relying trust, which is the basis of all social interactions. Although a small number of trust models have been proposed for the virtual medium, we find that they are largely impractical and artificial. In this paper we provide and discuss a trust model that is grounded in real-world social trust characteristics, and based on a reputation mechanism, or word-of-mouth. Our proposed model allows agents to decide which other agents' opinions they trust more and allows agents to progressively tune their understanding of another agent's subjective recommendations.

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Supporting trust in virtual communities

Trust propagation is the principle by which new trust relationships can be derived from pre-existing trust relationship. Trust transitivity is the most explicit form of trust propagation, meaning for example that if Alice trusts Bob, and Bob trusts Claire, then by transitivity, Alice will also trust Claire. This assumes that Bob recommends Claire to Alice. Trust fusion is also an important element in trust propagation, meaning that Alice can combine Bob's recommendation with her own personal experience in dealing with Claire, or with other recommendations about Claire, in order to derive a more reliable measure of trust in Claire. These simple principles, which are essential for human interaction in business and everyday life, manifests itself in many different forms. This paper investigates possible formal models that can be implemented using belief reasoning based on subjective logic. With good formal models, the principles of trust propagation can be ported to online communities of people, organisations and software agents, with the purpose of enhancing the quality of those communities.

Exploring different types of trust propagation

There has been a lot of research and development in the field of computational trust in the past decade. Much of it has acknowledged or claimed that trust is a good thing. We think it's time to look at the other side of the coin and ask the questions why is it good, what alternatives are there, where do they fit, and is our assumption always correct?

We examine the need for an addressing of the concepts of Trust, Mistrust, and Distrust, how they interlink and how they affect what goes on around us and within the systems we create. Finally, we introduce the phenomenon of ‘Untrust,' which resides in the space between trusting and distrusting. We argue that the time is right, given the maturity and breadth of the field of research in trust, to consider how untrust, distrust and mistrust work, why they can be useful in and of themselves, and where they can shine.

Trust, untrust, distrust and mistrust – an exploration of the dark(er) side

L'article traite des liens entre la confiance en tant que phenomene social et interactionnel, et les sciences et technologies de l'information, en particulier les interfaces-utilisateurs, les agents autonomes et les systemes d'information. Apres une premiere partie consacree a la litterature concernant le concept de confiance et ses definitions, l'A. s'interesse a ses ramifications dans les sciences et technologies de l'information, d'une part au niveau des interactions entre utilisateurs et technologies (notamment dans le cadre du commerce electronique), et d'autre part au niveau de l'information, en faisant reference a divers modeles de confiance.

The role of trust in information science and technology

A discussion of trust is presented which focuses on multiagent systems, from the point of view of one agent in a system. The roles trust plays in various forms of interaction are considered, with the view that trust allows interactions between agents where there may have been no effective interaction possible before trust. Trust allows parties to acknowledge that, whilst there is a risk in relationships with potentially malevolent agents, some form of interaction may produce benefits, where no interaction at all may not. In addition, accepting the risk allows the trusting agent to prepare itself for possibly irresponsible or untrustworthy behaviour, thus minimizing the potential damage caused. A formalism is introduced to clarify these notions, and to permit computer simulations. An important contribution of this work is that the formalism is not allen-compassing: there are some notions of trust that are excluded. What it describes is a specific view of trust.

Stephen Marsh

Papers

Formalising Trust as a Computational Concept

Exploring different types of trust propagation

Trust, untrust, distrust and mistrust – an exploration of the dark(er) side

The role of trust in information science and technology

Trust in Distributed Artificial Intelligence