1. **A stock–flow foundation** — trust as a depletable/renewable resource (the intuition, made explicit).
2. **A coupled dynamical system** — the predator–prey (Lotka–Volterra) analogy made rigorous, with deception as predator and trust as prey.
3. **A game-theoretic microfoundation** — an evolutionary population game that *generates* the macro dynamics, so the aggregate model isn't ad hoc.