The first substantive definition of 'trust' in the Oxford English Dictionary is 'confidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statement'. A later variant stresses the economic usage, defining it as 'confidence in the ability and intention of a buyer to pay at a future time for goods supplied without present payment'. Under either of these definitions, or the others offered in this volume, trust is based on an individual's theory? as to how another person will perform on some future occasion, as a function of that target person's current and previous claims, either implicit or explicit, as to how they will behave.

DEFINE: Provides the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of trust alongside a synthetic definition involving prediction of future behavior from prior claims.

Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking…, loc. 529