Agreements require backward calculation from the other’s future perspective, not forward prediction.

Evidence

Fifthly, and this follows from the fourth point, when you decide whether to enter into an agreement with a person, you need to look at the world from his perspective as it is likely to be when it comes to his having to fulfil his part of the agreement. This explains why the mathematician Richard Bellman (1957), and the game theorists Thomas Schelling (1960) and Reinhard Selten (1965; 1975), instructed us always to calculate backwards, against time, and not forwards, with time (I will elaborate on this point later on). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 788

Categorization

• XREF: Backward induction connects directly to game-theoretic analyses of trust and defection the reader works with via Hardin and Milgrom’s repeated-game work. — connects to: Contracts are collaborative social processes for confronting an unknowable future, not fixed plans. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1051