Guarantors must keep trust scarce and attributable to themselves to stay in business

Evidence

One reason the mafioso might prefer to offer trust in conjunction with discouraging competition is that if that trust were too public he would then be unable to enforce the collection of his fee from all sellers, who would find free-riding particularly easy. He might also find it difficult to check on all transactions carried out by those sellers he guarantees, with the risk of losing his reputation if a ‘lemon’ were to be sold behind his back. A further reason why his intervention as guarantor must always be identifiable — linked, that is, to specific transactions — is to make sure that the buyer knows that if he gets a good deal this is due to the mafioso’s protection and not to the independent honesty of the seller, which could foster the growth of trust directly between buyer and seller and put the mafioso out of business. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2245

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends Hardin’s claim that trust requires observable constraints — here the constraint must be observably attributed to the mafioso, not the seller, or the intermediary loses his position.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that trust-brokerage is self-undermining — a successful guarantee that builds direct buyer-seller trust destroys the guarantor’s own role — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting point about intermediaries.
• DEFINE: Clarifies why a trust intermediary must remain identifiable to each transaction — the professionalization of trust as a positional good.