Degrees Of Trust Research Articles

Public attitudes towards the UK banking industry following the global financial crisis

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to establish the antecedents of changes in public attitudes towards the UK banking industry following the global financial crisis.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire was administered to 1,066 people querying their attributions of blame for the crisis, attitudes towards the banking industry, levels of anger, knowledge of the crisis, degrees of moralistic trust, political orientations, prior perceptions of the banking industry's reputation, and whether they had personally suffered as a result of events. A structural equation model covering these matters was developed and estimated.FindingsA substantial deterioration in the favourability of public attitudes towards the banking industry seems to have occurred following the crisis. However, certain groups of respondents were much less critical of the industry's role in the crisis than were others.Research limitations/implicationsThe banking industry of just a single country was considered. Participants only commented on their attitudes towards the banking sector and not their actual banking behaviour.Practical implicationsCollectively, the banking industry needs to advertise the fact that failures on the part of public regulators played a critical role in the advent of the crisis. The industry should take joint action to influence the mass media's interpretations of the banking sector's current activities.Originality/valueThis was the first study to explore how members of the public interpret the post‐crisis identity and behaviour of the banking industry as a whole, rather than individual companies within it. The results contribute to knowledge concerning the determinants of attitude change vis‐à‐vis the banking sector and how customers might be segmented in terms of their perceptions.

Why European Subordinates Trust their Managers

AbstractThis article addresses the problem of why subordinates trust their managers based on the responses from 108 subordinates of seven Slovenian managers and from 138 subordinates of eight Swedish managers. The subordinates of these managers responded to a 20-item instrument tested for reliability and validity. In both samples the managers enjoyed different degrees of trust. The level of trust vested in Slovenian managers was higher than in Swedish ones. The kinds of managers’ actions that enhanced trust were similar amongst Swedish and Slovenian subordinates. Different socio-cultural contexts may theoretically explain why some other kinds of actions had contrasting effects between the samples. On the whole, the actions of managers explain trust in both countries. Subordinates’ trust in managers declines with the increasing hierarchical distance in both national samples. Managers need to show in action that they trust their subordinates, promote their interests, demonstrate appreciation of their subordinates, and solve problems.

Pursuing Trust in Environmental Regulatory Interactions

In environmental policy, the interactions of frontline environmental regulators and their counterparts in the regulated community constitute environmental protection in the United States. The authors offer a framework of the different types of interactions these actors may have with one another based on trust. Kettl and Fiorino, among others, have indicated that trust is a fundamental problem in environmental regulation. Building on these assertions, the authors delve into the extant trust literature and offer a definition of trust and, argue that trust is positive and should be sought in these relationships. The authors develop a framework of relationships between inspectors and facility personnel based on varying degrees of trust and offer testable hypotheses.

Modelos de reputação internacional e paradigmas de política externa

Reputação internacional é um objeto do direito internacional cujo valor se dá pela atribuição positiva ou negativa a respeito de um Estado pelos demais ou, de outro modo, pela capacidade de um determinado Estado agir de acordo com seus compromissos, frequentemente chamada de confiabilidade. Dessa forma, os imperativos da política externa de um país são qualificadores de sua recepção pela comunidade internacional entre graus variáveis de confiança e desconfiança. Este artigo tem como finalidade a organização tipológica de modelos de reputação com base tanto na existência de característica cooperativa quanto no exercício de preponderância que alguns Estados gozam no ambiente internacional competitivo.

Consumer's trust-in-food-safety typology in Taiwan: Food-related lifestyle matters

Though previous studies have closely examined public perceptions of various types of food hazards as well as trust and risk communication issues, no adequate attention has been directed to understanding an individual's trust-in-food-safety typology in terms of reflexive–non-reflexive and trust–distrust praxes associated with food-related lifestyles regarding the assessment, preparation and actual consumption of food products. The aim of this study is to understand ifpeople with different trust-in-food-safety typologies will have different food-related lifestyles. The ANOVA results in this Taiwanese case reveal that Denying respondents always obtained the lowest scores for all subscales of the food-related lifestyles scale except one (the recognition that cooking is a woman's task). Naïve respondents not only recognise that cooking is woman's task but also enjoy looking for new ways and have self-fulfilment in food. Sceptical respondents express high interest in specialty shops, price criteria, health, price/quality relation, organic products and freshness but do not recognise that cooking is woman's task. Sensible respondents express high interest in the importance of product information, shopping lists, whole family, planning and social relationships. But for each trust-in-food-safety typology, all respondents’ food-related lifestyles in terms of consumption situations and their attitudes toward advertising, their enjoyment from shopping and their interest in cooking are the same. Moreover, taste, convenience and security are equally important among the four types of respondents who have different degrees of trust in food safety. Some suggestions for the food policy makers and the marketers of the food industry are also provided here.

A Comparison of Institutional Confidence in China and Taiwan

Employing 2006-2007 World Values Survey data, this paper analyzes citizens’ trust in institutions, and to unravel how diverse factors might affect people’s institutional confidence in China and Taiwan. The empirical results reveal that Chinese have higher degrees of trust toward both public and private institutions. Additionally, Chinese have higher confidence in public institutions than in private institutions, whereas Taiwanese prefer to trust private institutions rather than public ones. We also find that Chinese confidence in public institutions is associated with younger generation, better education, Post-Materialism, life satisfaction, democratic evaluation, interpersonal trust, and associational engagement; moreover, their trust in civil institutions is generated by democratic evaluation, interpersonal trust, and associational engagement. In Taiwan, citizens’ confidence in public and civil institutions derive mainly from four sources- life satisfaction, democratic evaluation, interpersonal trust, and associational engagement. Otherwise, younger generations in Taiwan are more likely to trust in civil institutions. The conclusion indicates that the Chinese government’s basis for legitimacy has switched from economic prosperity to democracy, and the state may face serious challenges from emerging critical citizens in the near future.

Emergence of heterogeneity and political organization in information exchange networks

We present a simple model of the emergence of the division of labor and the development of a system of resource subsidy from an agent-based model of directed resource production with variable degrees of trust between the agents. The model has three distinct phases corresponding to different forms of societal organization: disconnected (independent agents), homogeneous cooperative (collective state), and inhomogeneous cooperative (collective state with a leader). Our results indicate that such levels of organization arise generically as a collective effect from interacting agent dynamics and may have applications in a variety of systems including social insects and microbial communities.

Reasoning with Uncertain and Conflicting Opinions in Open Reputation Systems

Reputation systems support users to distinguish between trustworthy and malicious or unreliable services. They collect and evaluate available user opinions about services and about other users in order to determine an estimation for the trustworthiness of a specified service. The usefulness of a reputation system highly depends on its underlying trust model, i.e., the representation of trust values and the methods to calculate with these trust vales. Several proposed trust models that allow representing degrees of trust, ignorance and distrust show undesired properties when conflicting opinions are combined. The proposed consensus operators usually eliminate the incurred degree of conflict and perform a re-normalization. We argue that this elimination causes counterintuitive effects and should thus be avoided. Therefore, we propose a new representation of trust values that reflects also the degree of conflict, and we develop a calculus and operators to compute reputation values. Our approach requires no re-normalizations and thus avoids the thereby caused undesired effects.

The relationship between network structure and international channel performance: a moderating effect of E-business activity

This study is an investigation of international marketing channel modes, relationship with an export company's network of business, e-business activity, and marketing channel performance. An initial case study of three international enterprises was followed up with a questionnaire survey based on a model derived from the literature and the results of the case organisations. The main influences identified from the questionnaire survey were local market conditions and the level of cooperation between channel members. The main differences detected among the network's structural relationships resulted from differing degrees of centralisation. Different channel modes resulted in different degrees of mutual trust, centralisation, profitability, and formality in the relationship between an enterprise and its overseas contacts. The level of electronic business activity was positively related to the level of cooperation with channel partners and to the sales performance of the channel.

An interoperable context sensitive model of trust

Although the notion of trust is widely used in secure information systems, very few works attempt to formally define it or reason about it. Moreover, in most works, trust is defined as a binary concept--either an entity is completely trusted or not at all. Absolute trust on an entity requires one to have complete knowledge about the entity. This is rarely the case in real-world applications. Not trusting an entity, on the other hand, prohibits all communications with the entity rendering it useless. In short, treating trust as a binary concept is not acceptable in practice. Consequently, a model is needed that incorporates the notion of different degrees of trust. We propose a model that allows us to formalize trust relationships. The trust relationship between a truster and a trustee is associated with a context and depends on the experience, knowledge, and recommendation that the truster has with respect to the trustee in the given context. We show how our model can measure trust and compare two trust relationships in a given context. Sometimes enough information is not available about a given context to evaluate trust. Towards this end we show how the relationships between different contexts can be captured using a context graph. Formalizing the relationships between contexts allows us to extrapolate values from related contexts to approximate the trust of an entity even when all the information needed to calculate the trust is not available. Finally, we show how the semantic mismatch that arises because of different sources using different context graphs can be resolved and the trust of information obtained from these different sources compared.

Enhancing Trust in Online Auctions: eBay’s Australian Experience With Code and Law

Operators of online auction venues, such as eBay, face competing demands. Most of those operators are reliant on income from fees paid by sellers and therefore must provide technical innovations and a contract structure favourable to those sellers. Simultaneously, the operators must lower the risk of bidding on auctions hosted by the site to ensure a steady supply of potential buyers (and successfully completed auctions). Lowering the risk to the buyer and the seller in an online auction will tend to lower their transaction costs (the cost of engaging in the transaction itself) and may enable the auction website to generate network effects which increase its market share. This article examines the decisions resolving two disputes relating to online auctions hosted by eBay Australia. It highlights the inter-relationship between the common law and statutory law in regulating online auctions to provide higher degrees of trust (over and above that generated through the use of architecture, norms and markets), thus lowering overall risk and transaction costs for both buyers and sellers.

UNITED STATES V. BOOKER AS A NATURAL EXPERIMENT: USING EMPIRICAL RESEARCH TO INFORM THE FEDERAL SENTENCING POLICY DEBATE*

Research Summary:In United States v. Booker, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the federal sentencing guidelines must be considered advisory, rather than mandatory, if they are to remain constitutional under the Sixth Amendment. Since the decision, the U.S. Sentencing Commission has provided policy makers with accurate and current data on changes and continuity in federal sentencing practices. Unlike previous changes in legal doctrine, Booker immediately increased the rates of upward and downward departures from the guideline range. Government‐sponsored downward departures remain the leading category of outside–the‐range sentences. The rate of within‐range sentences, although lower than in the period immediately preceding Booker, remains near rates observed earlier in the guidelines era. Despite the increase in departures, average sentence lengths for the overall caseload remain stable, because of offsetting increases in the seriousness of the crimes being sentenced and in the severity of penalties for those crimes. Analyses of the reasons that judges reported for downward departures suggest that treatment of criminal history and offender characteristics are the two leading areas of dissatisfaction with the guidelines.Policy Implications:Assessment of changes in sentencing practices following Booker by different observers depends partly on competing institutional perspectives and on different degrees of trust in the judgment of judges, prosecutors, the Sentencing Commission, and Congress. No agreement on whether Booker has bettered or worsened the system can be achieved until agreement exists on priorities among the purposes of sentencing and the goals of sentencing reform. Both this lack of agreement and an absence of needed data make consensus on Booker's effects on important sentencing goals, such as reduction of unwarranted disparity, unlikely in the near future. Similarly, lack of baseline data before Booker on the effectiveness of federal sentencing at crime control makes before‐after comparisons impossible. Despite these limitations, research provides a sounder framework for policy making than do anecdotes or speculation and sets valuable empirical parameters for the federal sentencing policy debate.

The interpersonal experience of health care through the eyes of patients with diabetes

Patients with chronic illness often face challenges navigating the US health care system because of the system's lack of coordination and continuity. Patients with more difficulty relying on others and with reluctance in engaging frequently or in-depth with providers, face even greater challenges obtaining optimal health care in this system. Using a self-report measure of attachment style, we selected patients with varying degrees of comfort and trust in relationships. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 27 patients with type 2 diabetes attending the University of Washington Diabetes Care Center in Seattle to explore issues of trust and collaboration in the health care setting. We used a constant comparative approach in which contemporaneous data collection and analysis took place. A subset of patients with fearful and dismissing attachment style reported having low levels of trust and an inability to collaborate with others of longstanding duration. Many aspects of the current health care system, such as its rushed, impersonal nature and a perceived “wall” between providers and patients were frustrating for most study patients. Patients with fearful and dismissing attachment style reported that these aspects of the health care system often interfered with their ability to partner with providers but also reported that patient-centered attitudes and behaviors by providers could improve their trust and ability to engage in the health care system. Implications of using a conceptual model of attachment theory to improve patient-centered care and customer service are discussed.

Coordinating collaborative joint efforts with suppliers: the effects of trust, transaction specific investment and information network in the Dutch flower industry

PurposeIt is the aim of this paper to discuss the value of trust and the effects of transaction specific investments for the relative degree of collaborative joint efforts, and also to assess the moderating effect of the information network on such joint efforts.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes the perspective of the buyer making the joint effort decision and draws on transaction cost economics, relational exchange and network perspectives to develop the hypotheses of the conceptual framework. Wholesalers and other merchant‐distributors in the Dutch flower industry provided the data to test the hypotheses.FindingsThe results show the importance of trust in coordinating the joint efforts and the joint effort response in terms of safeguarding and better integrating the transaction specific investments.Originality/valueWhile the information network does not moderate the relation between trust and joint efforts, there is a significant moderating effect of the network on the relation between transaction specific investments and joint effort. This result suggests that buyers temper their specific investments to the degree of joint effort according to the information that is obtained in the network. This implies that coordinating collaborative joint efforts with suppliers is more than just buying well. The degrees of trust, specific investments and the information from the network have managerial implications for the coordination of a buyer‐supplier relationship.

Interpersonal trust and social stress-induced cortisol elevation

A neuroendocrine correlate of interpersonal trust is relatively unknown. We investigated the relationship between an interpersonal trust-related personality (General Trust Scale) and cortisol elevation induced by social stress in 20 men. Spearman's rank order correlation analysis revealed a significant negative correlation between social stress-induced cortisol elevation and General Trust Scale. The present results indicate subjects with higher degrees of interpersonal trust have lower levels of neuroendocrine response to social stress.

Gerenciando relacionamentos colaborativos com fornecedores

O objetivo deste artigo é discutir a importância da confiança e o efeito dos investimentos em ativos específicos em relacionamentos colaborativos com fornecedores. O artigo ainda discute o efeito moderador da rede de informações sobre as ações colaborativas. Tomaram-se como base teórica as abordagens da economia de custos de transação e os estudos sobre canais de comercialização e redes organizacionais. Para testar as hipóteses formuladas, foram coletadas informações de atacadistas e outros distribuidores do setor de flores e vasos de plantas da Holanda. Os resultados sugerem que as informações obtidas na rede incentivam as ações conjuntas, como proteção para investimentos realizados pelos compradores. Constata-se também que o grau de confiança, os investimentos específicos e as informações obtidas na rede facilitam a coordenação de relacionamentos entre fornecedores e compradores.

Prospects for E-Government in Latin America: Satisfaction With Democracy, Social Accountability, and Direct Democracy

Direct democracy “from below” constitutes a strong tool of social accountability. Powerful arguments have been made regarding the information problem associated with direct democracy. In an increasingly complex world, citizens have trouble gathering enough information to make decisions on complicated issues. E-government offers a unique opportunity to solve, at least partially, the information problem. Granting access to information and services, e-government allows citizens to become more acquainted with the governing process.In order to assess the potentiality of extending e-government I created an index of E-government Potentiality. This index is constructed through the combination of diverse variables (education index; main telephone lines per 100 inhabitants; estimated PC per 100 inhabitants; and Internet users per 100 inhabitants). It is then compared with the actual use of e-government in the region (data came from West et al 2002). Surprisingly, there is not a direct proportional relation between those countries with high potentiality and those with actual broad use of e-government.The theoretical claim used to explain the lack of this relationship comes from the hypothesis that in developing countries where citizens are more satisfied with their democracy and have high degrees of interpersonal trust, the political will—a critical variable pointed out by the e-government literature—is not strong enough to engage in costly reforms and develop e-government. In other words, politicians lack enough incentives to alter the status quo. Why should they change if most people are basically satisfied with the state of affairs? Where countries have high levels of interpersonal trust and citizens are satisfied with democracy, e-government is less likely to develop.

Impact of contextual information integration on pixel fusion

Pixel fusion is used to elaborate a classification method at pixel level. It needs to take into account the as accurate as possible information and take advantage of the statistical learning of the previous measurements acquired by sensors. The classical probabilistic fusion methods lack performance when the previous learning is not representative of the real measurements provided by sensors. The Dempster-Shafer theory is then introduced to face this disadvantage by integrating further information which is the context of the sensor acquisitions. In this paper, we propose a formalism of modeling of the sensor reliability in the context that leads to two methods of integration: the first one amounts to integrate this further information in the fusion rule as degrees of trust and the second models the sensor reliability directly as mass function. These two methods are compared in the case where the sensor reliability depends on an atmospheric disturbance: the water vapor.

Cooperation in social dilemmas, trust and reciprocity

The present study attempts to connect cooperative behavior in the repeated play prisoner's dilemma (RPPD) with “trusting” and “reciprocal” behavior. Our goal is to see if people with different propensities to cooperate exhibit differing degrees of trust and reciprocity. We find the subjects who choose to cooperate in a RPPD game exhibit higher levels of trust. However when it comes to reciprocal behavior, cooperating subjects do not behave differently than subjects who choose to defect.

SENSOR FUSION INTEGRATING CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION

The application of multi-sensor fusion, which aims at recogizing a state among a set of hypotheses for object classification, is of major interest as regards the performance improvement brought by the sensor complementarily. Nevertheless this needs to take into account the more accurate as possible information and take advantage of the statistical learning of the previous measurements acquired by sensors. The classical probabilistic fusion methods lack of performance when the previous learning is not representative of the real measurements provided by sensors. The theory of evidence is then introduced to face this disadvantage by integrating a further information which is the context of the sensor acquisitions. In this paper, we propose a formalism of modeling of the sensor reliability to the context that leads to two methods of integration when all the hypotheses, associated to the objects of the scene acquired by sensors, are previously learnt: the first one amounts to integrate this further information in the fusion rule as degrees of trust and the second models the sensor reliability directly as mass functions. These two methods are based on the theory of fuzzy events. Afterwards, we are interested in the evolvement of these two methods in the case where the previous learning is unavailable for a hypothesis associated to an object of the scene and compare these two methods in order to deduce a global method of contextual information integration in the fusion process.