Guarantors favor repeat clients and may defraud one-time buyers

Evidence

From what the coachman says we also learn that, on another occasion, the mafioso succeeded in helping him to sell a blind horse as a good one. This indicates that the mafioso is not offering his protection to all buyers on the horse market: he is not really, in other words, dispensing a public good to the buyers either. We are not told, however, why the mafioso on one occasion satisfies the interests of both buyer and seller, while on this occasion he takes care only of those of the latter, at the expense of those of the former. It could be that the victim is an occasional buyer to whom it is not worth offering protection for just a single transaction, whereas on the other hand it would be advantageous to promote the (in this case dishonest) interests of his coachman friend. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2253

Categorization

• XREF: Foreshadows the chapter’s thesis, recalled from the Cavell chapter framing: trust is given intermittently to specific parties, not as a public good — mirrors the conditional, relationship-dependent trust Hardin describes.
• QUESTION: Why does the mafioso protect buyer and seller on one occasion but only the seller on another? The recurring-vs-one-shot distinction is floated but left unresolved — worth tracking how Saramago’s fictional example maps onto the recurring-game trust models.