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At the basis of the possible discrepancy in the subjective assessment of trustworthiness there
is the perception of how much an agent feels themselves to be trustworthy in a given task and
the assessment that they do of how much the other agents trust them in the same task.
In addition, this perception can change and become closer to the objective level while the
task is performed: the agent can either find out that they are being more or less trustworthy
than they had believed, or realize that the others' perception was wrong (either positively
or negatively). All these factors must be taken into account and studied together with the
different components of trust, in order to build hypotheses on strategic actions that the agent
can perform to cope with his relational capital.
We must consider what can be implied by these discrepancies in terms of strategic actions:
how can they be individuated and valued? How will the trusted agent react when he becomes
aware of that? He can either try to acquire competences in order to reduce the gap between
others' valuation and his own, or exploit the existence of this discrepancy, taking economic
advantage of the reputation over his capability and counting on the others' scarce ability to
monitor and test his real skills.
10.4 From Trust Relational Capital to Reputational Capital
However, there is another 'evolutionary' step in this path from dependence and interpersonal
trust relationships, to a personal, competitive 'relational capital' and the consequent 'negoti-
ation power' and role in the 'market'. The 'relational capital' of the individual is not just the
sum of the evaluations of the other members, and a simple interpersonal complex relation.
This is just the basic, inter-personal layer. But the agents communicate about the features, the
reliability, the trustworthiness of the others; and they not only communicate their own opinion,
but they also report and spread around - without personal commitment - what they have heard
about
Y
:
Y
's reputation
On such a basis a complex phenomenon emerges:
Y
's circulating reputation in that commu-
nity; which is represented in nobody's mind in particular. However, this circulating phantom
determines the individual perception of
Y
's reputation, then his trustworthiness in that com-
munity. In other words, beyond
Y
's ' trust-relational capital' there is an additional, emerging
'capital':
Y
's reputation. This capital in many contexts - in particular in open, anonymous 'mar-
kets', where individuals do not know each other - is the really fundamental one to determine
Y
's value in that market and his negotiation power.
This view of 'reputation' (rather close to Conte and Paolucci's theory-(Conte and Paolucci,
2002)) gives the right role to this important phenomenon and is less reductive than the view
we have used before. We have (correctly, but in a rather reductive way) presented 'reputation'
as one of the possible bases and sources of our evaluations and trust in
Y
. Apart from
personal
experience
of
X
about
Y
, apart from
reasoning and instantiation from general categories
,
roles
, etc., apart from
various forms of 'transfer'
of trust,
reputation
(that is the circulating
fame, voice, gossip about
Y
in a given community) can be the base of
X
's opinion and
trust in
Y
.
However, 'reputation' is not the single-agent 'opinion' about
Y
, or the communicated
personal evaluation of
Y
: it is an emerging, anonymous phenomenon - to which nobody
responds - which is self-organizing over the various implicit or explicit
messages
'about'
Y
's
virtues, competence and trustworthiness.
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