Degree Of Social Trust Research Articles

Elevating low-effort engagement to cultivate stronger community commitment: A study of social capital within Instagram's brand community

Purpose: This study aimed to analyze the role of social capital in enhancing the engagement of community members, specifically transitioning them from low-effort participation to higher levels of commitment toward the community.Design/methodology: This study presents the results derived from a quantitative analysis of 483 participants across diverse automotive brand communities found on Instagram.Findings: Based on the foundation of social capital theory, this research enquires into the effects of shared relational elements of social capital on the commitment of members to communities. The results indicate that when members perceive an adequate degree of social trust and adhere to a recognized norm of reciprocity, there is a notable influence on the potential for heightened commitment to the community.Research limitations/implications: This study solely focused on a specific type of social media, underscoring the prominent role of visual presentation style as the primary approach in content creation. As a result, this has a notable impact on the mechanism of social interaction among users.Originality/value: In visually oriented settings such as Instagram, the barriers to participating in social interactions are noticeably reduced. Consequently, activities that require only minimal engagement effort have a higher probability of evolving into more profound and intensified forms of social exchange among community members. This, in turn, greatly facilitates the cultivation of social trust and the establishment of a norm of reciprocity.

A Dynamic Social Network Matching Model for Virtual Power Plants and Distributed Energy Resources with Probabilistic Linguistic Information

Virtual power plants (VPPs) offer an effective means to address the imbalance issue between electricity supply and demand to advance the world’s low-carbon development. To fully utilize the limited resources in the virtual power plant planning stage, a two-sided match between VPPs and distributed energy companies is needed to better implement resource aggregation management. Because of the vagueness in this matching environment, the probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) is necessary to apply to express the decision makers’ preference. Considering the complex social relationships and intense competition among companies, a dynamic social network two-sided matching model is proposed for solving the multi-attribute two-sided matching decision-making problem. Firstly, we present a matching satisfaction degree described by PLTS. A dynamic social trust degree based on the sliding time concept is proposed. Secondly, the social trust network relationships are built based on the direct and indirect dynamic trust degree among companies. This relationship is then combined with an improved trust rank algorithm to identify the most authoritative and the most trusted company to provide the target company with a recommendation for the next moment. Besides, given that companies compete for limited resources, we further define the competitive satisfaction degree and apply the two-sided matching model. Additionally, then a two-sided matching model is developed. Finally, our model is tested numerically to ensure its accuracy and reliability.

Business Tax reform and CSR engagement: Evidence from China

This study investigates the impacts of tax incentives on firms' CSR engagement. Using the staggered Business Tax reform in China as exogenous shocks, our difference-in-differences estimation shows that tax incentives facilitate firms' CSR disclosure, and a plausible mechanism is the released financial burden. The result remains valid under a battery of robustness checks and is more pronounced for state-owned firms, firms with tighter political connections, firms with transparent information and firms locate in areas with higher degree of social trust. The study provides clear policy implications by elaborating on the favorable impacts of tax incentives on firms' CSR performance.

Trust Based Incentive Scheme to Allocate Big Data Tasks with Mobile Social Cloud

Recently, mobile social cloud (MSC), formed by mobile users with social ties, has been advocated to allocate tasks of big data applications instead of relying on the conventional cloud systems. However, due to the dynamic topology of networks and social features of users, how to optimally allocate tasks to mobile users based on the trust becomes a new challenge. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel incentive scheme based on the trust of mobile users in the MSC to allocate the tasks of big data. First, a social trust degree is defined according to the social tie among users, the importance of task, and the available resources of networks. With the social trust degree, the task owner can select a group of mobile users as the candidates for task allocation. Second, a reverse auction game model is developed to study the interactions among the task owner and the candidates. With the reverse auction game model, the optimal strategy of task allocation can be obtained with a low cost for the task owner where the selected candidate of mobile users can also obtain the high profit. Finally, simulation experiments are carried out to prove that the proposal can outperform other existing methods with a low delay and a high efficiency to allocate tasks in the MSC.

Social Capital, Environmental Knowledge, and Pro-Environmental Behavior.

As the value form of public access to environmental information, the impact of social capital on pro-environmental behavior cannot be ignored. Based on the data of the Chinese General Social Survey 2013 (CGSS2013), this study measures social capital from four aspects—social trust, social norms, social network, and social participation—and it empirically tests the impact of social capital on private and public pro-environmental behavior. The study finds that social capital helps promote pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, the more the public abides by social norms, the higher the degree of social participation, and the stronger the willingness to adopt private and public pro-environmental behaviors. However, the improvement of social trust only has a significant impact on the private environmental behaviors, and the expansion of the social network scale only has a significant impact on the public pro-environmental behaviors. The enhancement of social capital enriches environmental knowledge and promotes pro-environmental behaviors. The mechanism test shows that environmental knowledge plays an intermediary role in the path of social capital affecting individual pro-environmental behavior. The improvement of social capital has a significant impact on the environmental knowledge of individuals with high subjective social class. The gender heterogeneity of social capital affecting environmental knowledge mainly stems from social trust and social network. The stronger the degree of social trust, the richer the environmental knowledge of women, and the social network mainly affects the knowledge level of men. In addition, the publics in the southern region are more likely to be affected by social trust and improve environmental knowledge. Based on the above research conclusions, this paper puts forward policy suggestions on institutional aspects, such as increasing support for informal environmental organizations, carrying out differentiated sustainable development education, and improving the mechanism of environmental information communication.

Social inequality and health: the historical and sociological study

The article examines social determinants, which affect health under the context of the spread of a new coronavirus infection. The author points out that the study of the impact of various factors on the health of society and individual has been quite widely represented in scientific research discourse. There are also different classifications of them. However, in the current situation of a pandemic, this question is again actual because of the differences in the levels of morbidity and mortality among the population around the world. In this regard, based on the analysis of the main social determinants of health, the author defines the factors, which play a determining role in the spread of the new coronavirus infection. They are the following: the features of the organization and functioning of national health systems; the possibility of protecting and preventing health; the degree of social trust; the level of social solidarity; the degree of digital socialization, including the level of digital literacy; the level of health literacy of the population, national and cultural characteristics, which affect a compliance, the perception of preventive measures, in particular, vaccination. According to the author, these factors include both objective and subjective characteristics. But, no less that under the conditions of such a phenomenon, how can one characterize the situation, the current system of a pandemic of a new coronavirus infection, the health of an individual and society turns into a phenomenon of social construction, the mechanism of which is based on factors of external influence.

Lutheranism from Above and from Below: “Pastoral Professionals” and Trust within the Nordic State/Society Nexus

AbstractThe article points to the dispersion, democratization, and feminization of “pastoral” forms of power and authority since the mid‐19th century as a key to understanding the exceptionally high degree of social trust in the Nordic countries. Taking Norway as its central case, it argues that the Nordic welfare state has been shaped by an older, distinctively Lutheran–Pietist combination of educational forms of government from above and edifying popular self‐organization from below. This trust‐producing synthesis has been sustained by such “pastoral” professions as teaching, nursing, and social work, functioning as mediators between public welfare policies and the life world of citizens.

Does social trust affect international contracting? Evidence from foreign bond covenants

Building on rational choice institutionalism theory and Williamson’s (J Econ Lit 38(3): 595–613, 2000) four-level social analysis framework, we investigate the influence of the informal institution of social trust on debt contract design in an international setting. Using a sample of non-U.S. firms that issue bonds in the U.S. debt market, we find that Yankee bond creditors impose fewer covenants on bond issuers domiciled in countries with a high degree of social trust. We further show that the inverse relationship between debt covenants and the informal institution of social trust is more pronounced for firms from countries with weak formal institutions, as well as for firms with poor corporate governance and greater information opacity. These findings are robust to endogeneity tests, within-country analysis, various empirical models and measures of trust, and alternative hypotheses. We also show that, while a lower level of informal social trust is associated with higher borrowing costs, this relationship weakens when formal covenants are added to the debt contract (i.e., a substitution effect). Our paper contributes to the international business literature by providing new insights into the role of informal institutions (social trust) in cross-border debt contracting.

Cooperative Secure Transmission by Exploiting Social Ties in Random Networks

Social awareness and social ties are becoming increasingly popular with emerging mobile and handheld devices. Social trust degree describing the strength of the social ties has drawn lots of research interests in many fields in wireless communications, such as resource sharing, cooperative communication, and so on. In this paper, we propose a social ties based hybrid cooperative beamforming and jamming scheme to secure wireless transmissions under a stochastic geometry framework, where the friendly nodes are categorized into relays and jammers according to their locations and social trust degrees with the source node. Connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) of such a scheme in a random network have been analyzed. To facilitate a more convenient performance evaluation, we propose a double Gamma ratio approach through the Gamma approximation method. Based on this, the COP and SOP are tractably obtained in closed-forms. We further consider the SOP in the presence of Poisson point process distributed eavesdroppers and derive an upper bound. The simulation results verify our theoretical findings, and validate that the social trust degree has dramatic influences on the security performance in the networks.

An Integrated Open Approach to Capturing Systematic Knowledge for Manufacturing Process Innovation Based on Collective Intelligence

Process innovation plays a vital role in the manufacture realization of increasingly complex new products, especially in the context of sustainable development and cleaner production. Knowledge-based innovation design can inspire designers’ creative thinking; however, the existing scattered knowledge has not yet been properly captured and organized according to Computer-Aided Process Innovation (CAPI). Therefore, this paper proposes an integrated approach to tackle this non-trivial issue. By analyzing the design process of CAPI and technical features of open innovation, a novel holistic paradigm of process innovation knowledge capture based on collective intelligence (PIKC-CI) is constructed from the perspective of the knowledge life cycle. Then, a multi-source innovation knowledge fusion algorithm based on semantic elements reconfiguration is applied to form new public knowledge. To ensure the credibility and orderliness of innovation knowledge refinement, a collaborative editing strategy based on knowledge lock and knowledge–social trust degree is explored. Finally, a knowledge management system MPI-OKCS integrating the proposed techniques is implemented into the pre-built CAPI general platform, and a welding process innovation example is provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. It is expected that our work would lay the foundation for the future knowledge-inspired CAPI and smart process planning.

Does Social Trust Affect International Contracting? Evidence from Foreign Bond Covenants

Building on rational choice institutionalism theory and Williamson’s (2000) four-level social analysis framework, we investigate the influence of the informal institution of social trust on debt contract design in an international setting. Using a sample of non-U.S. firms that issue bonds in the U.S. debt market, we find that Yankee bond creditors impose fewer covenants on bond issuers domiciled in countries with a high degree of social trust. We further show that the inverse relation between debt covenants and the informal institution of social trust is more pronounced for firms from countries with weak formal institutions, as well as for firms with poor corporate governance and greater information opacity. These findings are robust to endogeneity tests, within-country analysis, various empirical models and measures of trust, and alternative hypotheses. We also show that while a lower level of informal social trust is associated with higher borrowing costs, this relation weakens when formal covenants are added to the debt contract (i.e., a substitution effect). Our paper contributes to the international business literature by providing new insights into the role of informal institutions (social trust) in cross-border debt contracting.

THREE CONCEPTS OF POLITICAL STABILITY: AN AGENT-BASED MODEL

Abstract:Public reason liberalism includes an ideal of political stability where justified institutions reach a kind of self-enforcing equilibrium. Such an order must be stable for the right reasons — where persons comply with the rules of the order for moral reasons, rather than out of fear or self-interest. John Rawls called a society stable in this way well-ordered.In this essay, I contend that a more sophisticated model of a well-ordered society, specifically an agent-based model, yields a richer and more attractive understanding of political stability. An agent-based model helps us to distinguish between three concepts of political stability — durability, balance, and immunity. A well-ordered society is one that possesses a high degree of social trust and cooperative behavior among its citizens (durability) with low short-run variability (balance). A well-ordered society also resists destabilization caused by noncompliant agents in or entering the system (immunity).Distinguishing between these three concepts complicates the necessary reformulation of the idea of a well-ordered society. Going forward, public reason theorists must now distinguish between types of assurance, specify heretofore unknown aspects of reasonable behavior, and reconceive of the nonideal preconditions for forming a stable, ideal social order.

Culture vs. Bias: Can Social Trust Mitigate the Disposition Effect?

We examine whether the investors sensitivity to behavioral biases is influenced by the social norms they are exposed to. We focus on the disposition effect of mutual fund investors. We consider two competing hypotheses. On the one hand, trust, by increasing the credibility of the numbers reported by the fund managers elicits stronger investor reactions. This results in a higher flow-performance sensitivity, which mitigates the tendency of selling winners and holding onto losers. One the other hand, societal trust, reducing the concern of expropriation, lowers the necessity for investors to react to bad performance. The resulting lower flow-performance sensitivity increases the disposition effect. Based on a proprietary dataset of the complete account-level trading information for all investors of a mutual fund family in China, we find compelling evidence that: 1) fund investors exhibit disposition effect; 2) a higher degree of social trust is associated with higher flow-performance-sensitivity; 3) (high) trust-induced flows mitigate the disposition effect. Our results suggest that behavioral bias may be strongly influenced by social norms.

Trust and risk perception of natural hazards: implications for risk preparedness in Chile

It has been found that both preparedness for disasters and public response are significantly influenced by risk perceptions and trust in authorities and experts. Although Chile is a country with a long history of natural disasters, few studies have evaluated the risk perceptions of natural hazards or the degree of social trust. The aim of this study was to evaluate risk perception in Chile regarding various natural hazards and the degree of trust on authorities and institutions. A survey was conducted in five major cities in Chile during the year 2013 and was completed by a total sum of 2054 participants. We assessed risk perception of nine natural hazards and the level of trust in ten national institutions and authorities. According to declared levels of trust, the institutions and authorities included in this study were categorized into three groups: (1) low trust, which included governmental authorities and institutions; (2) medium trust, formed by institutions with educational and preparation roles; and (3) high trust, formed by institutions and authorities responsible for maintaining public order and conducting rescue and aid operations. Although our results show that earthquakes, tsunamis and wildfires were natural hazards of greatest concern to the national population, they also reflect that there are specific additional concerns in different cities that are coherent with their individual history of natural disasters. Implications for natural disaster risk preparedness are discussed.

한국의 소셜네트워크서비스 신뢰지수 KTI 설계

소셜 네트워크를 통해 생산 유통되는 정보들은 신뢰할 수 없는 불분명한 정보들이 많고 그런 정보들이 무분별하게 확산되기 때문에 사용자들은 정보에 대한 신뢰성 여부를 판단하기가 힘들다. 특히 정보의 신뢰성에 대한 평가가 전적으로 사용자들의 판단에 맡겨지고 있는 상황에서, 온라인 정보의 신뢰도에 대한 체계적인 평가 방안의 마련이 절실하다. 본 논문에서는 소셜네트워크서비스의 신뢰도 평가 지표로서 KTI (Korean Trust Index for SNS)를 설계하여, 서비스 사용자들이 정보의 신뢰성을 판단할 수 있는 기준을 제시하였으며, 이를 통해 사회적 신뢰 수준을 분석할 수 있도록 하였다. SNS의 서비스 특성을 고려하여, 신뢰도에 영향을 주는 요인을 정의하였고 이를 바탕으로 온라인에서 유통되는 정보에 대한 신뢰도를 평가할 수 있는 신뢰모델을 설계하고 신뢰지수 KTI를 제시하였다. 신뢰지수 KTI의 개발은 SNS에 대한 신뢰 수준을 측정하여 이를 정량화함으로써, SNS 연결망을 효율적으로 활용하기 위한 신뢰 확보가 가능할 것으로 기대한다. Due to the spread of unreliable online information on the social network services, the users are faced with a difficult problem for determining if the information is trustworthy or not. At present, the users should make a decision by themselves throughly for the trustworthiness of the information. Therefore, we need a way to systematically evaluate the trustworthiness of information on the social network services. In this paper, we design a trust index, called KTI (Korean Trust Index for SNS), as a criterion for measuring the trust degree of the information on the social network services. Using KTI, the users are readily able to determine whether the information is trustworthy. Consequently, we can estimate the social trust degree based on the variation of KTI. This paper derives the various factors affecting trust from the properties of the social network services, and proposes a model to evaluate the trustworthiness of information that is directly produced and distributed over the online network. Quantifying the trust degree of the information on the social network services allows the users to make efficient use of the social network.

Forcing the dumb to sing? Rejuvenating farmer cooperatives in Uganda amidst waning social capital

Neoliberal reforms had for long recommended large scale corporate agriculture as the way forward; small scale peasant agriculture was considered as a hindrance to the capitalist progress of developing countries. However, crises that have befallen countries like Uganda, especially poverty and food crises have heightened the pressure and questions about the whole philosophy of corporate agriculture and food production, shifting the attention of policy makers towards the need to boost the incomes of smallholders through collectivization. In Uganda, for instance, the state's need for poverty reduction and increased food supplies, the national development framework, Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) and its successor, the National Development Plan (NDP) called for the organization of the peasantry and smallholder farmers into collective units commonly referred to as Savings and Cooperative Organizations (SSACO) through which rural producers would be organized and assisted. This would also aid government’s effort to eradicate poverty and hunger in the broader interest of achieving Millennium Development Goal (MDG) number one. In some parts of the country this collectivization program has entailed bulking smallholders' lands into collective farms not only to enhance productivity and food security but also benefit from local, national and regional markets, heralded by the coming in place of an East African Customs Union. This article seeks to question the orthodoxy, logic and anticipated success of this new form of collectivization in the face of declining and/or absent social capital and trust as well as weak institutions. Moreover, societies with a low degree of social trust are less likely to create the flexible and prosperous business organizations that can compete in both national regional economies. Key words: Social capital, collectivization, farmer groups, neoliberalism.

중․고등학생의 사회적 신뢰와 사회참여

The purpose of this article is to inquire the relation between the social trust and social participation of secondary school students. The results show that the degree of social trust and social participation of secondary school students is low and the corelation value between social trust and social participation is low. If the social trust is fundamental elements of the social participation and citizenship, we must prepare the citizenship education for improving the social trust.

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

In his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of 21st-century capitalism. In Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order after History, he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance. Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy. A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation's economic health.