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What is trust in economics?
Every monetary system runs on some form of confidence. DollarAndGold groups that confidence into five recurring patterns.
Economists don't usually talk about 'trust' as a single measurable thing — but nearly every question about why an asset is valuable eventually reduces to some form of confidence: confidence in an institution, in a network, in a company's future, or in one currency relative to another.
DollarAndGold organises this into five recurring trust models — Institution, Scarcity + History, Network + Mathematics, Productive Capacity, and Relative Confidence — because most assets you'll encounter lean heavily on one of them, and knowing which one tells you what to actually watch.
None of these models are mutually exclusive in practice, and none of them are static — a currency can lose institutional trust, a network can gain adoption, a company's productive capacity can be disrupted. The model tells you the lens to look through, not a fixed verdict.
See it in the data
The full comparison, with a flagship example for each.
See all five trust models