The Deficit and Dynamics of Trust

Trust and Belief are two very closely connected notions. Hence one would expect that any mechanism that guides the management of one can efficaciously guide the other. In fact, devices such as Dempster-Shafer’s theory of evidence have been successfully used in the management of both. This paper looks at a different mechanism devised for inductive inferencing, namely Spohn’s Ordinal Conditional Functions, and shows that, when appropriately adapted and interpreted, it can fruitfully model the dynamics of trust via trust deficit.