Subjectivity and Objectivity of Trust

Trust plays an important role in the fields of Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and Multi-agent Systems (MAS), which provides a more effective way to reduce complexity in condition of increasing social complexity. Although a number of computational issues about trust have been studied, there has to date been little attempt to investigate the differences between Objective Trust (OT) and Subjective Trust (ST). In this paper, we will rectify this omission. Particularly, we study the relationship between OT and ST, and propose Transitive Trust (TT) based on ST. We show that, differing with OT, ST is related to preferences of agents. We propose three rules to form trust framework, and give an example to illustrate the process of trust formation. We finally characterize some useful properties of OT and ST.