Why Trust is not Proportional to Risk

Trust is inherently related to risk, but for trust assessment to be integrated with the management of the risks involved in trust based cooperation, the exact relation must be well understood. Existing literature on trust management is neither clear nor unambiguous on this issue. This paper discusses notions of trust as presented within the disciplines of sociology and economics for the purpose of motivating trust management. A critical survey of state of the art literature on trust management is provided, where weaknesses and ambiguities with respect to clarifying the notion of trust are discussed. An analysis and explanation of the exact relationship between risk and trust is presented, and implications of the subjectivity of trust relations are accounted for