Residual Trust After Verification: A Microeconomic Account of What Proofs Cannot Eliminate

Abstract

This paper formalizes residual trust as dependence remaining after verification. It supplies vocabulary (verification surface, residual surface,residual-surface disclosure, trust transfer), maps use cases, compares zero-knowledge proofs with residual trust, presents comparative residual-risk tables,and proposes metrics of verification and residual trust—covering coverage, intensity, residual share r, disclosure completeness, and operationaldetectability—without treating them as calibrated forecasts. Open artefacts are linked for illustration only.Keywords: residual trust; verification metrics; residual surface; zero-knowledge; risk comparison; incomplete contracts.JEL: D23, D82, D86, G30, L14.