SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF INFORMATION SECURITY

To the links that bind, secured with love, and reciprocated with trust. To my family, Marziyeh, Abbas, Fatemeh, Amir. ii The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the methodological foundation of the studies aiming to assess trust between people who interact through Computer Mediated Communication (CMC), specifically those who create a set of online relationships which is commonly called Online Social Networks. The most popular method that is currently employed by researchers in this area is Trust Game, one form of the social dilemma games. The major studies that assess trust in social networks have established results that are mainly formed into hypotheses for the effects of a number of network parameters on the extent to which individuals would place trust on each other. However, hypotheses for the effects of a few number of network parameters is not deducible since the restrictive game-theoretic assumptions that are imposed into the model do not let any such evidence available. In addition, these assumptions inhibit the analysis of the trust situations in a more realistic environment than one in which actors are instructed by the axioms of the Trust Game. One way to relax th