Economists treat trust as background rather than transaction cost

Evidence

Trust is central to all transactions and yet economists rarely discuss the notion.! It is treated rather as background environment, present whenever called upon, a sort of ever-ready lubricant that permits voluntary participation in production and exchange. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 772

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Directly parallels Luhmann’s point that trust is a ‘familiarity’-based background condition taken for granted until it fails — the very substrate the reader is analyzing in the blindness epidemic.

Related

• Trust is an assumed background in standard economics, not a studied variable (similarity 0.91)
• Trust functions as a lubricant that reduces economic transaction costs (similarity 0.84)
• Most trust is unreflective, routinized background assumption rather than calculated risk (similarity 0.83)
• Trust can be purchased at the price of commitment expenditure (similarity 0.83)
• Skipping trust research while economizing on trust has been wrongly conflated (similarity 0.83)
• Trust cannot be eliminated from ongoing economic relations. (similarity 0.82)
• Strategies to minimize reliance on trust have been conflated with neglecting to understand it. (similarity 0.82)
• Trust as mere incentive compatibility would make the concept otiose. (similarity 0.82)
• Trust solves problems of risk but operates only within a familiar world (similarity 0.82)
• Luhmann aimed his trust theory at empirical application (similarity 0.81)
• Trust rests on expectations about others’ actions bearing identifiable risk (similarity 0.81)
• Conditional trust can be rationally adopted even among egoists without social ties (similarity 0.81)
• Trust reduces transaction costs the way lubricant reduces friction (similarity 0.81)
• Trust requires genuine choice, occupying the space between determinism and indeterminacy (similarity 0.81)
• Established trust systems are remarkably robust despite widespread fraud (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Most trust is unreflective, routinized background assumption rather than calculated risk #corroborates (0.95) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 146