Essays on trust

This Doctoral Thesis is built around these insights and the main objective is to define a theoretical framework for the analysis of trust dynamics. It is constituted of three papers. The first one is a broad and deep overview of the research on the topic of trust. The objective is to demonstrate how pervasive the concept is in academic research, independent of disciplines. In the other two papers, two models are presented, one dealing with a dyadic interaction setting, and another dealing with a social setting. Both models investigate trust dynamics with a particular focus on its primitives. The aim is to demonstrate how beliefs and preferences play a fundamental role in shaping trust and its consequences. Attention is also given to the social and cultural dimensions of trust.