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. Summary 1. Overview This thesis presents an overview of trust as a social phenomenon and discusses it formally. It argues that trust is: • A means for understanding and adapting to the complexity of the environment. • A means of providing added robustness to independent agents. • A useful judgement in the light of experience of the behaviour of others. • Applicable to inanimate others. The thesis argues these points from the point of view of artificial agents. Trust in an artificial agent is a means of providing an additional tool for the consideration of other agents and the environment in which it exists. Moreover, a formalisation of trust enables the embedding of the concept into an artificial agent. This has been done, and is documented in the thesis. 2. Exposition There are places in the thesis where it is necessary to give a broad outline before going deeper. In consequence it may seem that the subject is not receiving a thorough treatment, or that too much is being discussed at one time! (This is particularly apparent in the first and second chapters.) To present a thorough understanding of trust, we have proceeded breadth first in the introductory chapters. Chapter 3 expands, depth first, presenting critical views of established researchers.

The article develops a process and control model for the analysis and design of inter-firm relations, in which both opportunism and trust play a role. Its aim is to develop a tool which helps to analyze combinations, balances and imbalances of trust and opportunism, formal and informal forms of governance, and viable sequences of strategies of governance, depending on different conditions. It employs both transaction cost economics and social exchange theory. 1

Abstract. In this paper we develop a notion of “objective trust ” for Software Agents, that is trust of, or between, Agents based on actual experiences between those Agents. Experiential objective trust allows Agents to make decisions about how to select other Agents when a choice has to be made. We define a mechanism for such an “objective Trust-Based Agent ” (oTB-Agent), and present experimental results in a simulated trading environment based on an Intelligent Networks (IN) scenario. The trust one Agent places in another is dynamic, updated on the basis of each experience. We use this to investigate three questions related to trust in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), first how trust affects the formation of trading partnerships, second, whether trust developed over a period can equate to “loyalty ” and third whether a less than scrupulous Agent can exploit the individual nature of trust to its advantage. 1

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In this article, we argue that not all social connections contribute to social capital as most people have conceived it. People with strong ethnic identifications and who associate primarily with people of their own kind either will withdraw from civic participation or will belong only to orga-nizations made up of their own nationality. People with looser ties to their in-group are more likely to take an active role in the larger society. We show the importance of acculturation on broader dimensions of civic engagement by analyzing a Los Angeles Times survey of ethnic Chi-nese in Southern California in 1997.

Density and strength of ties in innovation networks: a competence and governance view

This study extends the existing research on strategic alliances (SAs) by exploring independent and combined effects of distributive, procedural and interactional justice in this setting. By integrating justice and alliance theories, we develop a framework that links payoff for cooperation with organizational justice as perceived by the boundary spanning executives in SAs, through whom perceptions of justice are transformed into parent actions. The analysis of 127 SAs demonstrates that when goal differences between parties are high, the joint effect of procedural and distributive justice is significantly positive in relation to alliance performance. When the level of interactional justice is high, procedural or distributive justice exerts an even stronger effect on alliance performance. Along with these results, a justice perspective enriches alliance research, especially regarding procedural formalization, incentive structure, and interparty attachment. 3 In recent years, research on organizational justice has proliferated. The field of organizational justice began to develop in the 1960s, when Adam’s (1965) introduced his equity theory, which focused on the perceived fairness by employees of outcomes, such as pay selection and promotion

The aim of this paper is to examine the relation between trust and knowledge codification in the context of the implementation of an expert system in the French steel company, Usinor. The Sachem (Système d’Aide à la Conduite des Hauts Furneaux en Marche) expert system project, which was designed to improve blast furnace control, was initiated by Usinor in the

In the course of this thesis SimOffice, an environment with trust-based access control for Web services, was developed. Web services are gaining

This paper analyzes the evolution of agency theory and shows how Austrian economists and, in particular, Mises largely anticipated these developments. Our analytical framework is the evolution of agency theory and we argue that it is a quest for more realism that has been the driving force of this evolution. We analyze how the agency literature has evolved since its first developments with the standard principal-agent models by integrating into the analytical framework the role played by implicit incentive mechanisms to minimize the problems associated with asymmetric information and conflicts of interest. We analyze how research in different fields has contributed to agency theory's evolution and we show that these developments can be traced back to the work of Austrian economists and, in particular, to Mises's works. We finally argue that despite the fact agency theory has largely improved its analysis of agency problems and of the remedies to mitigate these problems, it has not yet incorporated in its analyses a crucial contribution made by the Austrian economists, which is the role played by the entrepreneur.