We propose that the trust an agent places in another agent declaratively captures an architectural connector between the two agents. We formulate trust as a generic modality expressing a relationship between a truster and a trustee. Specifically, trust here is definitionally independent of, albeit constrained by, other relevant modalities such as commitments and beliefs. Trust applies to a vari...

Today, one of the most important factors of successful e-commerce is creating trust and security. Undoubtedly, in absence of trust as a key element of online business communications, e-commerce will face a lot of challenges. Assessing trust, especially in the beginning of a commercial relation and generally, formulizing the trust is a complex and difficult task. Trust may not be defined in a sp...

The concept of trust in multi-agent systems (MASs) has received significant attention in recent years, and a number of approaches have been proposed to enable agents to form, maintain and use trust relationships in their dealings with others. However, current approaches do not adequately address highly dynamic multi-agent systems, where the population and structure changes frequently. For examp...

This paper describes an empirical study to capture the influence of owner-manager general trust (GT) on organizational structure and performance in SMEs. Hypotheses are tested with data from a sample of 103 Irish manufacturing SMEs. The results indicate that owner-manager GT has a positive influence on performance in hightech SMEs but a negative effect in low-tech SMEs. The hypotheses on the re...

A general scheme for trust-region methods on Riemannian manifolds is proposed. A truncated conjugate-gradient method is utilized to solve the trust-region subproblems. The method is illustrated several problems of numerical linear algebra.

This paper defines and empirically tests a new concept of general trust in the remote-hosting (RH) vendor community. In the absence of prior experience or familiarity with RH vendors, and because third-party guarantees do not yet exist to assure expected results, previous trust mechanisms are inapplicable. Therefore, based on the Transaction Cost Economy theory and on the broad trust-related bo...

A major goal of ideological education in China is to promote loyalty to the party-state and to instill atheism among the people. How effective is this ideological education? This article examines the relationship between education and trust in government and trust in religion using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey. We find that education is negatively associated with trust in go...

In this paper, we discuss a general methodology for analysis and modeling of trust relationships in distributed computing. We discuss the classification of trust relationships, categorize trust relationships into two layers and provide a hierarchy of trust relationships based on a formal definition of trust relationship. We provide guidelines for the analysis and modeling of trust relationships...