Trust metrics (the book)

Title: Trust Metrics

Possible subtitle: The socio-technological infrastructure for the future society

Introduction
''A possibly cool start could be to tell a story, about an exclusive French society of dove breeders in the 17th century and how they managed their society with an hand-managed circle of trust. See Dovester (was: Ancient Social Networks)''

Trust is pre-historic. Animals trust eachother. And sometimes they don't.

The title of this book is a bit presumptuous. Since, how can we measure this concept called trust?

Well, in fact, measuring trust is ancient as well. 

The word "metric" in the the title might refer to the fact that it could be possible to overimpose a layer of trust over a society and to define a sort of Metric space on it, a metric space is a set where a notion of distance (called a metric) between elements of the set is defined.

What is trust
Trust is not an easy concept to explain. We all have our own conception of trust. Each person has their own conception of trust.

Grady Ward's Moby Thesaurus II contains 285 synonyms for "trust".

According to the Oxford Dictionary:

"Trust is the firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something."

One of the most cited definition of Trust is from a paper by Diego Gambetta in :

"Trust (or, symmetrically, distrust) is a particular level of the subjective probability with which an agent will perform a particular action, both before [we] can monitor each action (or independently of his capacity of ever be able to monitor it) and in a context in which it affects [our] own action."

Trust in Sociology
This is Bernard Barber's Definition.

Three expectations in the sense of trust from "The Logic and Limits of Trust" (1983):


 * 1) Expectation of the persistence and fulfillment of the natural and moral social orders
 * 2) Expectation of "technically competent role performance" from those we interact with in social relationships and systems
 * 3) Expectation that partners in interaction will "carry out their fiduciary obligations and responsibilities, that is, their duties in certain situations to place others’ interests before their own"

Also very relevant the concept of Weak tie by Granovetter.

Economics
Money is a form of trust in whoever issued the money. Typically (i.e. national currencies), this is in the central bank of the country concerned. Recently, decentralised 'microcurrencies' have been proposed which have a single issuer (2005, Upton; )

A trust
(Law) An estate devised or granted in confidence that the devisee or grantee shall convey it, or dispose of the profits, at the will, or for the benefit, of another; an estate held for the use of another; a confidence respecting property reposed in one person, who is termed the trustee, for the benefit of another, who is called the cestui que trust. (1913, Webster; )

Monetary Definitions
Trust is measured by how much credit each will offer me

Ripple is a free software project for developing and implementing a protocol for an open decentralized payment network. In its extreme form, the Ripple network could be a peer-to-peer distributed social network service with a monetary honor system based on trust that already exists between people in real-world social networks.

Modern monetary systems are built on obligations of the participants to each other. Cash and bonds are government obligations, and loan agreements are the personal obligations of borrowers. Bank account balances are bank obligations, backed by borrower and government obligations. For an obligation to have value, the holder must trust that the issuer can supply that value. Thus the banking network can be described as a trust network.

'Money as IOUs in Social Trust Networks & A Proposal for a Decentralized Currency Network Protocol'

Game theory
There is a lot of research about trust in social dilemma games, public good games, trust games, etc.

Trust in Psychology
In the category of psychology, one popular definition about trust is given by Morton Deutch, which is :
 * 1) If an individual is confronted with an ambiguous path, a path that can lead to an event perceived to be beneficial (Va+) or to an event perceived to be harmful (Va-);
 * 2) He perceives that the occurrence of Va+ or Va- is contigent on the behavior of another persone; and
 * 3) He perceives that strenght of Va- to be greater than that strength of Va+. If he chooses to take an ambiguous path with such properties, I shall say he makes a trusting choice; if he chooses not to take the path, he makes a distrustful choice.

Trust in political science
The first trust metric could have been proposed by John Locke. We could write an interesting story about this, maybe even in the introduction.

Trust in Medicine
Oxytocin increases trust in humans

Neuroeconomic Foundations of Trust and Social Preferences

Informatics
https, certificates, spam.

Probabilistic Definitions
''trust (or, symmetrically, distrust) is a particular level of the subjective probability with which an agent will perform a particular action, both before [we] can monitor such action (or independently of [our] capacity of ever to be able to monitor it) and in a context in which it affects [our] own action. ''

Diego Gambetta. 'Can we trust trust?' 1988.

Trust in virtual communities
Examples from flickr, Amazon, Ebay, Advogato, Linkedin, Friendster Dovester, CouchSurfing, ....

Largely overlapping with A survey of trust use and modeling in current real systems

Trust in real-life communities
Contrary to popular belief, there are still hitchhikers these days. Hitchhiking is an interesting social concept, when regarding weak ties. [find reference!]

Hospitality exchange is much older even than Servas, the organization founded in 1949. In the Islamic world hospitality is very common

Not really in real life, but in the real life of a science fiction novel: Whuffie in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Trust in books
Are these concepts used in classic books, such as Alice in Wonderland, or War and Peace?

Can trust be measured?

 * How to measure trust?
 * Trust metric.

Google uses a trust metric
Everytime you google for something you are actually using trust metrics. PageRank is a trust metric. It tries to measure the trust that webpages have in other webpages, i.e. links.

The future of trust
As our subtitle says, trust can be the socio-technological infrastructure for the future society.

While in previous chapters we analyzed the state of the art and the history, in this chapter we speculate on the role of trust in the future society.

Actually, trust has been described as the “constitutive virtue of, and the key causal precondition for the existence of any society”. Other contributions from economy highlight how trust is directly correlated with the “creation of prosperity” or suggest to consider trust as a commodity. Reasoning on trust statements issued by other people has also been suggested as a way to balance the “information asymmetry” between the two parties, buyer and seller, involved in a potential economic transaction.

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Here we make the last, somehow obvious, step: why can't be trust used to regulate any aspect of out society? Actually sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow in his novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" already envisioned a possible future society (the Bitchun society) in the 22nd century in which nanotechnologies have made death obsolete, there is no more scarcity of goods. This abundance has brought about the end of labor and money, and the only thing that makes one person worth more than anyone else is Whuffie, a constantly updated rating that measures how much esteem and respect other people have for you. This rating system determines who gets the few scarce items, like the best housing, a table in a crowded restaurant, or a good place in a queue for a theme park attraction. This society is already a society collectively relying on decentralized trust statements.

(In fact, there is also already the concept right-hand whuffie and left-had whuffie ~ local and global aggregated trust! From wikipedia: A gross Whuffie score looks the same to everyone viewing it, but a weighted Whuffie score is subjective. This meta-Whuffie takes into account right-handed Whuffie (the amount given by people you like) and left-handed Whuffie (given by people you dislike). Another variety is pity Whuffie, given to those who are down on their luck.)

Open trust network, open society
Or maybe free?

Write here about the need to have data exportable (social-network-portability)

http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

http://www.plaxo.com/info/opensocialgraph

http://opensocialweb.org

http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability

http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/08/open_social_net

And the implications for a free society.

Other books on trust

 * http://print.google.com/print?ie=UTF-8&q=trust+reputation+social&btnG=Search
 * http://print.google.com/print?ie=UTF-8&q=%22trust+metric%22&btnG=Search