The Deeper Inquiry

The social science literature on trust and trustworthiness is relevant to the trust layer's design in ways that the technical literature sometimes obscures. Trust, as analyzed by scholars from Diego Gambetta's edited volume Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (1988) through Onora O'Neill's work on trust and transparency (A Question of Trust, 2002) to recent work by Rachel Botsman on distributed trust, is not a property of individuals that can be measured and aggregated. It is a relational phenomenon that emerges in specific contexts through specific experiences. The trust layer must be designed with this understanding of trust rather than with the simplified model — trust as a score — that makes the technical problem more tractable but the result constitutionally problematic.

The mechanism design literature on reputation systems provides the technical foundation for understanding why trust scores are vulnerable to gaming and what design choices affect their gaming resistance. Paul Resnick and Richard Zeckhauser's foundational analysis of eBay's reputation system, the extensive subsequent literature on reputation systems in online markets, and the more recent work on adversarial robustness in machine learning systems all contribute to understanding the technical side of the gaming problem. The constitutional response to gaming vulnerability — treating the gaming of trust signals as a constitutional violation rather than merely an operational problem — is a governance response that must accompany the technical design.