The role of trust in market exchange has been of consistent interest to marketing researchers over the past decade. Many researches in marketing have shown that customer trust in a company and its representatives can positively influence customer loyalty. However, a customer¡¦s deal with a particular product/service provider can also be influenced by the customer¡¦s trust in the broader marketplace¡Xfor example, trust in those who regulate the market and trust in the professionals who populate the marketplace. Drawing from a number of disciplines in addition to marketing, we identify three types of trust (Institutional Trust, Role Trust, Generalized Trust) in the broader marketplace that might influence trust (interpersonal trust, firm-specific trust) between two exchange partners. Using survey results collected from direct sellers of Taiwan¡¦s direct selling companies, we test competing theories about the influence of this trust. Our results show that the influence of broad-scope trust on customer loyalty is not direct, but is mediated by narrow-scope trust. Because the substitutional view implies a direct relationship between broad-scope trust and customer loyalty, this finding supports the foundational view of the relationship between broad-scope and narrow-scope trust.

This thesis acts as an initial attempt to investigate how the relationship between one’s generational belonging, educational level, gender and membership in a variety of organizations on the matter of vertical and horizontal trust vary with one’s primary country of origin. Building on data from Riks-SOM 2014, it is shown that one’s primary country of origin not seem to have a unique effect on several of our selected variables on trust. Despite some variation amongst the variables, the results provide a picture of what in previous literature has been described as prosperous traits for the accumulation of trust amongst individuals still are of relevance within in the contemporary Swedish society. The primary focus is thus to be found at a micro-level. Also, the results show that the effect of one’s primary country of origin on our predictor variables is weaker than initially expected, leading to the rejection of some of our hypotheses. This does not indicate the absence of a trust-gap amongst Swedish citizens, as some results provide strength to such claims. However, the central point this thesis wishes to bring forth concerns that contemporary policy-makers should put its focus on promoting the importance of education post-high school level, and membership in certain organizations if the aim is to increase and promote trust for all within our contemporary Swedish society, as the logistic regression analyses here presented tells us a story of that such traits are beneficial for the accumulation of trust.

Building trust is a common requirement in distributed environments especially since many transactions now occur on a person-to-person basis. Examples range from e-commerce on the Internet to peer-to-peer and grid resource sharing. Many solutions to the problem of requiring trust among unknown entities rely on the use of a reputation metric to assess the risk of a potential transaction. However, such reputation systems require (often implicitly) that trust is transitive which can be a problematic assumption. This dissertation proposes a novel mechanism which we call trust*. The trust* model uses guarantees to extend local trust between unknown end-points. Trust* can be used as a substitution for end-to-end trust. Principals provide guarantees within existing (local) trust relationships to build a chain of localised agreements between the unknown end-points. The guarantees are backed by local micropayments to provide deterrents and incentives. Trust* relationships can be composed transitively, and the guarantees reduce the risk for the trusting party when doing so. This is because a guarantee is only ever provided locally by a directly trusted principal. Thus, trust management can be reduced to a locally solved problem. This work aims to develop a new technique for assessing and reducing the risk involved in trusting others in a distributed environment. The thesis of this dissertation is that an electronic analogue of real-world guarantees, is a useful and interesting way to provide these assurances. We develop an extension of the notion of trust, which we call trust*, which is built upon local guarantees, and which provides a novel conceptual framework for analysing and reasoning about a wide variety of trust-related problems in distributed systems. We present the concept of trust* and apply it to a number of application scenarios where it would be beneficial. We simulate the trust* model in these environments for analysis. Also, we describe the key features and other issues related to the trust* model which became evident during its investigation and which are of wider interest.

Research on social capital during the past two decades has shown that willingness to trust is linked to a host of individual and social outcomes, such as health, education, democracy, and robust economies. In this thesis I examine the ways in which religion may affect attitudes of trust, employing both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Specifically, three aspects of religion have been examined: denominational affiliation, spiritual belief, and the nature of the social interactions of the members of a faith community. Contextual factors relating a particular tradition to the broader society have also been included in the analysis. My findings suggest that although there is scant evidence to the effect of theology on trust, a much stronger influence on trust comes from the nature of social interactions (in the form of community‐building) and contextual factors (i.e., having a history of discrimination or being a resident of Quebec). / ix, 154 leaves ; 29 cm

Title: Trust development: a marketing strategy in the Internationalization of Healthcare Services.The case of Elekta in Spain Level: Master Thesis in Business Administration Author: Sara Arrese and Wang Liao Supervisor: Maria Fregidou-Malama Examiner: Akmal Hyder Date: 2014-10-02 Aim: The aim of this research is to examine how trust developing affects International Healthcare Services marketing while settling down into a new country. Our study is applied to Elekta in Spain. Method: In order to carry out this research, qualitative data is used, a single case study is applied, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were carried out to collect the needed primary data. Result and Conclusions: In the case of Elekta Spain, the trust development between suppliers and customer took place during the entire relationship. In addition, the trust level at company level and individual level were found to be the most significant leaving aside the country level as there were different opinions between customers (which did not find it a deciding factor) and Elekta. Hence, for the marketing strategy, standardization and adaptations can improve trust development. Suggestions for future research: Generalization cannot be made after this research as a single case study in one country has been the subject for investigation. Consequently, future research of other service industries and countries could expand this study. Contribution of the thesis: This thesis offers a new theoretical framework of trust development in the Spanish Healthcare Industry. This framework not only can be adapted to further study of other countries, but also can be adapted to further study of other service industries.

Multi-agent systems are increasingly popular for modeling distributed environments that are highly complex and dynamic such as e-commerce, smart buildings, and smart grids. Often in open multi-agent systems, agents interact with other agents to meet their own goals. Trust is considered significant in multi-agent systems to make interactions effectively, especially when agents cannot assure that potential partners share the same core beliefs about the system or make accurate statements regarding their competencies and abilities. This work describes a trust model that augments fuzzy logic with Q-learning, and a suspension technique to help trust evaluating agents select beneficial trustees for interaction in uncertain, imprecise, and the dynamic multi-agent systems. Q-Learning is used to evaluate trust on the long term, fuzzy inferences are used to aggregate different trust factors and suspension is used as a short-term response to dynamic changes. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated using simulation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed model can help agents select trustworthy partners to interact with. It has a better performance compared to some of the popular trust models in the presence of misbehaving interaction partners. When interactions are based on trust, trust establishment mechanisms can be used to direct trustees, instead of trustors, to build a higher level of trust and have a greater impact on the results of interactions. This work also describes a trust establishment model for intelligent agents using implicit feedback that goes beyond trust evaluation to outline actions to guide trustees (instead of trustors). The model uses the retention of trustors to model trustors’ behaviours. For situations where tasks are multi-criteria and explicit feedback is available, we present a trust establishment model that uses a multi-criteria approach to help trustees to adjust their behaviours to improve their perceived trust and attract more interactions with trustors. The model calculates the necessary improvement per criterion when only a single aggregated satisfaction value is provided per interaction, where the model attempts to predicted both the appropriate value per criteria and its importance. Then we present a trust establishment model that integrates the two major sources of information to produce a comprehensive assessment of a trustor’s likely needs in multi-agent systems. Specifically, the model attempts to incorporates explicit feedback, and implicit feed-back assuming multi-criteria tasks. The proposed models are evaluated through simulation, we found that trustees can enhance their trustworthiness, at a cost, if they tune their behaviour in response to feedback (explicit or implicit) from trustors. Using explicit feedback with multi-criteria tasks, trustees can emphasize on important criterion to satisfy need of trustors. Trust establishment based on explicit feedback for multi-criteria tasks, can result in a more effective and efficient trust establishment compared to using implicit feedback alone. Integrating both approaches together can achieve a reasonable trust level at a relatively lower cost.

This research proposed a new model for online interpersonal trust based on eight properties of new online social networks. Two elements were found to have significant contributions. These were the ability for users to create an online personal profile where their real identity is disclosed, and the ability to create connections to other online users. The user's innate propensity to trust was also validated as a moderating force on online trust. These results have significant implications for further academic research and online practitioners.Online trust has long been understood as one of the biggest barriers to e-commerce and online business. Various online trust models have been developed and a common theme is the lack of an interpersonal trust component that exists in many real world trust models. Interpersonal trust has been excluded because the internet was considered an impersonal medium. This research argues that the internet has changed to become more personal, and that interpersonal trust is now possible online.The aim of this research was to assist businesses and web designers in understanding drivers of online trust on the new social web. From an academic perspective the aim was to challenge existing online trust knowledge to include interpersonal trust. An online survey was snowball sampled to South African users of Facebook. The survey tested the contribution of eight properties of new online social networks to online trust. The data was analysed using structural equation modelling and the model was found to have a good fit to the data. Further work however is required on the measurement instrument and sampling. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

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The purpose of this thesis is to describe the functioning of trust in the common law jurisdictions and its expansion to the civil law countries. It also focuses on the brand new Czech institute "Svěřenský fond" (trust fund) introduced by the new Czech Civil Code and aims to analyse its nature in regard to its trust context. The thesis is composed of three chapters, each of them dealing with different set of "trust" issues. Chapter One is descriptive. It deals with the history of fiduciary relationships in the Roman, medieval, Austro-Hungarian and Czechoslovak law as well as the current statutory provisions governing administration of property of others and trust funds in the Czech Republic. It also addresses a number of current ambiguities that have arisen from the recent re-codification. The Second chapter is comparative. Part One includes introductory remarks concerning comparative law issues. Part Two describes the nature and functions of trust in the common law jurisdictions and explains the trust taxonomy. Parts Three and Four provide an outline of several mixed jurisdictions as well as civil law jurisdictions and maps their approach to trusts. Chapter Three is analytical. First part examines the theoretical discrepancies in the civil law and common law notions of property along with other...

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:34:04Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Oswaldo .pdf: 1604013 bytes, checksum: 6d99c82d6d43bfa876ffdd06d8471632 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-05-08 / The social process finds itself by a hard economic policy management, in other word, macroeconomic, which follows the rules fixed by free capital ( neomonetarists ). We understand that it is not a regional estate or a single prerogative applied to certain countries. Nowadays, this concept that the power of the State manages its society is a general statement, however we may detach that this process has deeper consequences in developing countries. This circumstance which we have preferred to name along the text as neoliberalism, neomonetarism or neocapitalism, has its target in the money excessive exploration, willing to accumulate even more money. In this context, the production process which is responsible for job creations and, as a consequence, for wealth distribution in the national society, remains stagnant. Corroborating with the market stability, to avoid the neomoneatarists escape, the power of the State uses its forcibility for the conduction of the national macroeconomic policy. The tools for a long-living relationship with the neocapitalists (foreigners or residents) are the maintenance of high levels of interest rates at the money consumer market and the increment whose intention is to build laws to guarantee the monetary hegemony at the national economic order. The second extraordinary effect is denoted as the suppression of dignity of the human being, caused by the exploration of two weakened classes of members of the national society. The first of them are the old-aged retired people, and the other is the employees workers. Both of them possess two precious conditions that please to tears the neomonetarists . The first is the undeniable need that they have to borrow money to decrease their social cost deficit; and the second is the guaranty of the payment of the bond fore the financial and credit societies, because the deduct of the installments is made directly to the payers work bill. Finally, the third preoccupant effect, which is formed during this process, is about the abusive deportment, mostly illegal, of offshore companies established in tax heaven countries. Off course, the State power gets annoyed with this operations practiced by these companies in our (Brazilian) market, whereas without stealthy the federal receipt shows openly a 53 names list with the countries considered as tax heaven , which allow free taxes for offshore companies and completely ignore the source of the patrimony belonged to the companies that has established there. We made a synthesis in this work, by which we tried to enlighten the historic beginning of financial speculation in the world; the dynamics of foreign capital flow to Eastern Asia; the systemic economic crisis unleashed in Asian countries; the Brazilian way to inflation and foreign debt increase between the decades of 1980 and 1990; the many and insolvent financial plans of economic stabilization, and mostly the rendezvous with globalization and register laws for foreign capitals in our economic order. After all, the Anglo-Saxony Trust institute was compared to the Brazilian fiduciary juridical system purposing to demonstrate a new vision of guaranty in the national juridical, political and social-economical order, to try to stop the illegal procedures taken by offshore companies to which do not reach the effects of punishment. / O processo de socialidade no Brasil encontra-se submetido a uma rígida administração de política econômica, ou melhor, macroeconômica, segundo a qual, segue às exigências impostas pelo capital liberalizado ( neomonetarismo ). Entendemos não se tratar de uma conjuntura regional ou uma prerrogativa aplicada exclusivamente a um ou outro país. Hoje, esse conceito pelo qual o poder estatal administra sua sociedade encontra-se na órbita universal , contudo, podemos destacar que há uma maior acentuação em países cujo desenvolvimento econômico são considerados emergentes ou em desenvolvimento. Esta circunstância que preferimos chamá-la durante esse trabalho por vários pseudônimos como: neoliberalismo, neomonetarismo ou neocapitalismo; tem o escopo de explorar excessivamente o dinheiro nesses países objetivando acumular apenas por mais dinheiro. Nesse contexto o processo de produção segundo o qual responsabiliza-se pela empregabilidade e conseqüentemente pela distribuição da renda na sociedade nacional se encontra estagnado. Por isso, que o Produto Interno Bruto no país tem se retraído demonstrando níveis pífios de desenvolvimento econômico. Corroborando com a estabilidade dos mercados para não dispersar uma fuga dos neomonetaristas, o poder estatal emprega coercibilidade na condução da política macroeconômica nacional. Os sustentáculos para uma duração pacífica com os neocapitalistas (estrangeiro ou nacional), estão à égide da manutenção da liberalidade de aplicação de taxas de juros extremamente altas no mercado consumidor de dinheiro (empréstimos no varejo); e por conta da sustentação de uma continuada valorização da moeda nacional frente ao dólar. Daí decorrem alguns efeitos que serão destacados e criticados nesse trabalho. O primeiro importante resultado desse processo está na atual concepção da ordem jurídica. Entendemos que o jurista nacional por conta do domínio neocapitalista foi suplantado por doutrinadores econômicos cuja finalidade é confeccionar Leis financeiras para garantir a hegemonização da monetarização na ordem econômica nacional. O segundo extraordinário efeito denota-se a luz da supressividade da dignidade da pessoa humana. O foco dessa exploração encontra precipuamente dois fragilizados membros da sociedade nacional. O primeiro é o idoso subvencionado, e o segundo é o trabalhador (com registro fixo em sua carteira de trabalho CNT). Ambos contém duas preciosas condições que enchem de alegria os olhos dos neomonetaristas . A primeira é a inegável necessidade que têm de contrair empréstimos financeiros para com esses recursos minimizarem o déficit de seu custeio social; e a segunda é a garantia do adimplemento obrigacional (cumprimento das prestações pecuniárias) junto à sociedade de crédito e financiamento por conta do desconto das prestações serem feitas diretamente na fonte pagadora do seu benefício ou salário. Finalmente o terceiro preocupante efeito que se forma durante esse processo trata das condutas abusivas, sobretudo ilícitas de companhias offshores (verdadeiras empresas fantasma de impossível descaracterização personae ) constituídas em paraísos fiscais. Evidentemente, o poder estatal incomoda-se com as operações praticadas por essas companhias em nossos mercados (de produção, financeiro e de capitais), visto que, sem reserva, a Receita Federal apresenta publicamente uma lista denominando quais são os 53 países considerados paraísos fiscais, segundo os quais propiciam liberdade tributária e ignoram por completo a origem patrimonial da companhia offshore que lá se instituí. Fazemos uma síntese neste trabalho segundo a qual procuramos esclarecer à história do início da especulação financeira no mundo; a dinâmica do fluxo do capital estrangeiro para Ásia Oriental; a crise econômica e sistêmica desencadeada nos países asiáticos; as décadas de 1980 e 1990 no Brasil que marcou rota inflacionária e endividamento; os diversos e insolúveis planos financeiros de estabilização econômica e, sobretudo o encontro com a globalização e as legislações de registro para capitais estrangeiros em nosso ordenamento econômico. Por fim o Instituto Trust do direito Anglo-Saxônico britânico será comparado com direito fiduciário brasileiro com a proposta de demonstrar uma visão de garantia na ordem jurídica, política e sócio-econômica nacional, para tentar frear as condutas ilícitas de companhias "offshores" sobre as quais não se alcança o efeito da punibilidade.