Social networks and trust: not the experimental evidence you may expect

We run a laboratory experiment where 'friendship' networks are generated endogenously within an anonymous group. Our experiment builds on two phases in sequence: a network formation game and a trust game. We find that in those sessions where the trust game is played before the network formation game, the overall level of trust is not significantly different from the one observed in a simple trust game; in those sessions where the trust game is played after the network formation game we find that the overall level of trust is significantly lower than in the simple trust game. Hence surprisingly trust does not increase because of 'enforced reciprocity' and moreover a common social history does affect the level of trust, but in a negative manner. Where network effects matter is in the choice of whom to trust: while we tend to trust less on average those with whom we have already interacted compared to total strangers, past history allows us to select whom to trust relatively more than others

Crisis Management

[Excerpt] It’s no longer a matter of WHETHER a crisis will happen or not, it’s a matter of WHAT TYPE it is and WHEN it occurs. An organization (and its union) that can manage and recover from a crisis demonstrates competence – the results can mean survival, growth, and profitability , which also means preserving and growing jobs while building reputations and trust

Defining Trust Using Expected Utility Theory

Trust has been discussed in many social sciences including economics, psychology, and sociology. However, there is no widely accepted definition of trust. Inparticular, there is no definition that can be used for economic analysis. This paper regards trust as expectation and defines it using expected utility theory together with concepts such as betrayal premium. In doing so, it rejects the widely accepted black-and-white view that (un) trustworthy people are always (un)trustworthy. This paper also discusses various determinants and properties of trust on the basis of the idea that trust is not simply a matter of intention.Definitions of Trust, Distrust Premium, Betrayal Premium, Properties of Trust, Expected Utility Theory

Promissory Estoppel and the Protection of Interpersonal Trust

This paper examines the role of trust in promissory estoppel and the extent to which the law should protect trust when a promise is made. Part II of this Article summarizes some of the scholarship discussing the nature and role of trust. In particular, it discusses the role of trust in a market economy, and the related role of trust in Contracts law. Part III examines whether there is a difference between trust and reliance, and whether it matters. Part III further asserts that a separate discussion of trust is beneficial because it has the potential to guide and inform internal decision-making in a way that is not possible by simply focusing on outward reliance. Part IV of this Article discusses the role of trust in the doctrine of promissory estoppel. Part V sets forth why the law should promote an optimal level of trust, as opposed to a maximum protection of trust no matter what. It discusses the need for promisees to exercise self-reliance and self-protection in order to avoid overreliance. Part VI identifies the types of cases where trust should be protected. Such cases include ones where the promisee is engaged in a transaction that she cannot avoid, where she has no control over the structure of the transaction, and where she has no choice but to trust the promisor (or more accurately, trust the legal system to enforce the promise). Part VII presents the polar end of the spectrum where trust should not be protected. Part VIII concludes the Article

Trust in school: a pathway to inhibit teacher burnout?

Purpose: This paper considers trust as an important relational source in schools by exploring whether trust lowers teacher burnout. We examine how trust relationships with different school parties such as the principal relate to distinct dimensions of teacher burnout. We further analyze whether school-level trust additionally influences burnout. In doing this, we account for other teacher and school characteristics. Design: We use quantitative data gathered during the 2008-2009 school year from 673 teachers across 58 elementary schools in Flanders (i.e. the northern Dutch-speaking region of Belgium). Because teacher and school characteristics are simultaneously related to burnout, multilevel modeling is applied. Findings:. Trust can act as a buffer against teacher burnout. Teachers’ trust in students demonstrates the strongest association with burnout compared to trust in principals or colleagues. Exploring relationships of trust in distinct school parties with different burnout dimensions yield interesting additional insights such as the specific importance of teacher-principal trust for teachers’ emotional exhaustion. Burnout is further an individual teacher matter to which school-level factors are mainly unrelated. Implications: Principals fulfill an important role in inhibiting emotional exhaustion among teachers. They are advised to create a school atmosphere that is conducive for different kinds of trust relationships to develop. Actions to strengthen trust and inhibit teacher burnout are necessary, although further qualitative and longitudinal research is desirable. Originality/value: This paper offers a unique contribution by examining trust in different school parties as a relational buffer against teacher burnout. It indicates that principals can affect teacher burnout and prevent emotional exhaustion by nurturing trusting relationships in school

Mattresses versus Banks - The Effect of Trust on Portfolio Composition

This paper adds to the growing literature that studies whether trust affects the financial decisions of people. More specifically, we investigate whether lack of trust in banks can explain why people save their savings in cash, ‘under the mattress’, rather than deposit their savings at the bank. We find a significant effect of lack of trust on the likelihood that a person saves money in cash but also that lack of trust can only provide part of the explanation for the ‘money under the mattress’ phenomenon. Other factors that matter are the financial awareness and access to bank services.trust, bank deposits, cash savings, financial awareness

The Transformation of Trust in China’s Alternative Food Networks: Disruption, Reconstruction, and Development

Food safety issues in China have received much scholarly attention, yet few studies systematically examined this matter through the lens of trust. More importantly, little is known about the transformation of different types of trust in the dynamic process of food production, provision, and consumption. We consider trust as an evolving interdependent relationship between different actors. We used the Beijing County Fair, a prominent ecological farmers’ market in China, as an example to examine the transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks. We argue that although there has been a disruption of institutional trust among the general public since 2008 when the melamine-tainted milk scandal broke out, reconstruction of individual trust and development of organizational trust have been observed, along with the emergence and increasing popularity of alternative food networks. Based on more than six months of fieldwork on the emerging ecological agriculture sector in 13 provinces across China as well as monitoring of online discussions and posts, we analyze how various social factors—including but not limited to direct and indirect reciprocity, information, endogenous institutions, and altruism—have simultaneously contributed to the transformation of trust in China’s alternative food networks. The findings not only complement current social theories of trust, but also highlight an important yet understudied phenomenon whereby informal social mechanisms have been partially substituting for formal institutions and gradually have been building trust against the backdrop of the food safety crisis in China

Certificate polygamy: a matter of trust

Tese de mestrado em Segurança Informática, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2011O acesso a serviços disponíveis na Internet expõe os utilizadores a diversos ataques, tal como o Man-in-the-Middle (MitM). As defesas para estes ataques, tais como autenticação mútua através de uma Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), baseiam-se em infra-estruturas complexas que os utilizadores não estão disponíveis para utilizar e suportar. A enorme aceitação de métodos de autenticação designados por “acto de fé” (leap-of-faith) ou “confiar na primeira utilização” (TOFU, trust-on-first-use), utilizado em implementações comuns de SSH e TLS/SSL, dão sinais claros da pré-disposição dos utilizadores em sacrificar a segurança em prol de uma melhor usabilidade. Aliás, este é um comportamento comum na vida quotidiana das pessoas. Se alguém se apresentar apenas com um cartão de visita, teremos tendência a confiar no seu conteúdo. Apenas desconfiaremos se, mais tarde, outra identificação for apresentada. Por outras palavras, confiamos nas primeiras credenciais apresentadas. Esta temática foi abordada por soluções como o Perspectives, que fornecem autenticação tipo SSH com sondagens através de múltiplos caminhos/acessos, descrito em [1]. Através da observação e recolha das chaves públicas observadas ao longo do tempo por servidores espalhados geograficamente, designados por Notários, o Perspectives impede muitos dos ataques possíveis num cenário de TOFU. Um utilizador pode solicitar o historial de chaves de um determinado serviço, comparando-o à chave oferecida na utilização corrente, e com esse historial tomar uma decisão mais informada quanto ao aceitar uma chave que não exista em cache. No entanto, o Perspectives assume um certificado por sítio, o que não é um pressuposto válido em muitos casos. Nesse caso, como pode o utilizador distinguir entre um certificado adicional introduzido pelo serviço a que está a aceder, e uma situação de ataque, em que o certificado está a ser fornecido pelo atacante? A presente tese endereça esta temática de poligamia de certificados, aumentando a visão dos Notários por forma a fornecer uma visão consolidada de diversos certificados. Adicionalmente, sugerimos alterações a alguns módulos do Perspectives, nomeadamente o módulo de sondagem (probing) for forma a lidar com questões tais como existência de mecanismos de caching acoplados aos serviços, pela utilização de, por exemplo, proxies.Users are vulnerable to attacks, such as Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack, whenever they resort to services in the Internet. Common defenses for these attacks, like mutual authentication based, for example, on a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), rely on complex infra-structures that users are unwilling to support. Huge acceptance of simple methods like Trust-on-first-use (TOFU, also known as “leap-of-faith” authentication), employed by popular implementations of SSH and TLS/SSL, clearly indicate that users are prepared to sacrifice security for the sake of low-cost and more usable solutions. Moreover, this is a behavior that users are familiar with. If one meets a person who hands over some credentials, such as nickname, email address or even a business card, one will bind those credentials to that person in all future contacts, without initially asking for his or her ID. In other words, one trusts these credentials on the first time they are seen, and then uses them in all future interactions with that person. This topic has been addressed previously in solutions like Perspectives, which provides SSH-style Host Authentication with Multi-Path Probing, as described in [1]. By observing and collecting the server’s public keys over time, maintaining them in a set of geographically disperse servers known as “Notaries”, Perspective thwarts many of the attacks that are possible in a TOFU scenario. A user can download such records on demand, comparing them with the current key provided by the site being accessed. Although not secure to all attacks, users can make a more educated decision on accepting or rejecting each certificate. However, Perspectives assumes one certificate per site, which is a false assumption in some cases. So, how can users differentiate between a distinct, legitimate certificate provided by the site, and a fake certificate provided by an attacker? This thesis addresses this certificate polygamy issue, by enhancing the concept of the Notaries used in Perspectives, and provides a consistent view of a set of certificates to the user. Moreover, it suggests changes in modules like the probing module, to keep a clear and consistent observation of certificates, despite caching and reutilization made by components such as proxies. By allowing the user (or, by company policies) to fine tune some configuration parameters, the proposed solution will provide different levels of confidence to the observed server’s public keys, thus satisfying distinct levels of security, or user proficiency

A Matter of Trust: Why Congress Should Turn Federal Lands into Fiduciary Trusts

The Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service collectively manage well over a quarter of the land in the United States. Although everyone agrees that the lands and resources managed by these agencies are exceedingly valuable, the lands collectively cost taxpayers around $7 billion per year. Several Cato Institute studies have called for privatization of the public lands, but this idea is strongly resisted by environmentalists, recreationists, and other users of public land. An alternative policy that will both enhance the values sought by environmentalists and improve the fiscal management of the lands is to turn them into fiduciary trusts. Under this proposal, the U.S. would retain title to the lands, but the rules under which they would be governed would be very different. Fiduciary trusts are based on hundreds of years of British and American common law that ensures that trustees preserve and protect the value of the resources they manage, keep them productive, and disclose the full costs and benefits of their management. For trust law to apply, public land trusts must be based on a law written by Congress that clearly defines the trustees, the beneficiaries, and a specific mission or missions for the trusts. Congress should create two types of trusts. Market trusts would have a mission of maximizing revenue while preserving the productive capacity of the land. To achieve this mission, Congress should allow them to charge fair market value for all resources. Nonmarket trusts would have a mission of maximizing the preservation and, as appropriate, restoration of natural ecosystems and cultural resources on the public lands. Each pair of market and nonmarket trusts would jointly manage all federal lands in one of about a hundred ecoregions. Each ecoregion would have about 5 to 10 million acres of federal land that might include forests, parks, refuges, and other public lands. Trustees would be elected by a friends' association that anyone would be welcome to join. Trusts would be funded out of the user fees they collect, with some retained by the market trust and some given to the nonmarket trust. In some cases, excess user fees would be returned to the U.S. Treasury. The trust idea would significantly improve both fiscal and environmental management of the public lands. Congress should begin to implement this idea by testing it on selected national forests, parks, and other federal lands

Matters of Trust as Matters of Attachment Security

I argue for an account of the vulnerability of trust, as a product of our need for secure social attachments to individuals and to a group. This account seeks to explain why it is true that, when we trust or distrust someone, we are susceptible to being betrayed by them, rather than merely disappointed or frustrated in our goals. What we are concerned about in matters of trust is, at the basic level, whether we matter, in a non-instrumental way, to that individual, or to the group of which they are a member. We have this concern as a result of a drive to form secure social attachments. This makes us vulnerable in the characteristic way of being susceptible to betrayal, because how the other acts in such matters can demonstrate our lack of worth to them, or to the group, thereby threatening the security of our attachment, and eliciting the reactive attitudes characteristic of betrayal