Trust, Control and Autonomy: A Dialectic Relationship - Trust Theory: A Socio-Cognitive and Computational Model - page 189

Core Trust x y τ

Decision to
Delegate

foreseen
control

Action of
Control

Action of
Delegation

yes no

Result of
positive
decision

External (world)
factors

Influence
of the
delegation
on the task

Execution of
the delegated
task

Preferences
Conveniences

Decision elements

Figure 7.2 Decision, delegation and control

Also the frequency of intervention is relevant. As explained above, the intervention is strictly
connected with the presence of the monitoring/reporting on the task, even if, in principle, both
the intervention and the monitoring/reporting could be independently realized. In addition,
also the frequencies of intervention and of monitoring/reporting are correlated. More precisely,
the frequency of intervention could be:

1) never;
2) just sometimes (phase or time, a special case of this is at the end of the task);
3) at any phase or at any time .

Figure 7.2 shows how the control action impacts on the execution of the task after the
trustor's delegation to the trustee. Plans typically contain control actions of some of their
actions (Castelfranchi and Falcone, 1994).

7.1.3 Control Replaces Trust and Trust Makes Control Superflous?
As we said before, a perspective of duality between trust and control is very frequent and at
least partially valid (Tan and Thoen, 1999). Consider for example the definition of (Mayer
et al. , 1995): 4

The willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation
that the other party will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the
ability to monitor or control that other party

4 About our more analytic considerations on this definition see Chapter 1 in this topic.