Trust is widely recognized as a crucial element in collaboration, cooperation, and team working in any organizational and inter-organizational relationship. It is so important so that numerous studies and prescription text have attempted to iluminate this concept. Extant literature suggest the concept of trust is far more complex than what we could understood. It involves not only rationality but also feeling or emotion and recriprocality. So how can we measure trust?
Hi Mohammad,
This is a question I had to deal with in my thesis with a twist. I assumed none of the people (agents) knowing each other initally. Fundamentally, the "sign" of trust may vary depending on the application (from "like" in facebook, positive feedback in Ebay to a link from a webpage to another (PageRank)). What comes to research papers, the case studies showing the excellence of the presented method typically selects a case to support the answer sought by the authors.
Having said this, trust can coarsley be divided to policy- and reputation-based trust. The former is used typically in security (rules, authentication etc.) giving a Boolean answer, either something is trusted or not. The latter takes a "softer" view and typically gives a metric, the greater the better. Many of the trust metrics restrict trust to the bounded intervall [0, 1], i.e. a precentage. In this case your question is: what is needed for a good measure? Frequently, this is feedback. The type and treatment of such feedbacks is yet another question. So is whether or not you consider trust as an evolving metric or not.
Having said this, for some good views on trust take a look at:
Josang et al. work: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1225716
Kamvar et al. EigenTrust: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EigenTrust
If I understood what you seek right, then EigenTrust is a good place to start.
Hope these helps.
Dear Mats,
Thank you for your critical insights regarding this twisted concept. I am planning to measure trust as snapshot/ reflective of the trustor-trustee felt at the end of their relationship. So in my case I will use static measures of trust. You are indeed right, there are many facets and names of trust. What I am looking for is trust measures in inter-organizational and/or interpersonal interaction. There are some known type of trust such as institutional trust, competence trust, credibility trust, cognitive trust, affective trust, etc. Thanks for the links, both are interesting readings.
Even if people have different skills and are part of different organizations, trust is seen best when put into disscution the results of their work.
In this regard, it will be observed ambiguities in their work because there is no trust in work partners. This is quite natural: Working in partnerships we must trust, because otherwise it will be bad for our work.
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