Building Relationships with Trust

In this chapter we put together two major threads of work: trust in the enactment of contracts and the modelling of relationships between agents. We depart from previous work where trust is defined as the relationship between commitment of action and instant observation of the actual actions being performed. Here we generalise the approach by assuming a time delay between the observation of the actions and their valuation. The fundamental new idea being that commitment for action has a social dimension as the commitment of an agent should mean ‘attempting to act’ in the interest of the contractual partner, and that attempt has a time dimension that cannot be ignored.Peer Reviewe