Markets organize exchange so that trust in trading partners is largely unnecessary.

Evidence

It is the genius of the market to organize exchange in ways that commonly do not require high levels of trust. Its workings recall Barak’s response when asked whether he trusted Arafat (quoted in chapter 1). His answer was that trust was not at issue because each sought to push the interests of his own people. Similarly, in the market, I do not trust Ford or Microsoft, but I do rely on them to follow their own interests in being disciplined by market incentives, perhaps with a bit of help from public regulatory agencies. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core thesis mapping Saramago’s blindness to the collapse of observability: markets here substitute incentive-discipline for the observable monitoring that Luhmann’s familiarity requires, and that Hardin elsewhere grounds in ongoing relationships.
• DEFINE: Sharpens the reader’s integration by distinguishing ‘trust’ from ‘reliance on incentive discipline’ — a conceptual distinction central to Hardin’s overall account and to applying it to the doctor’s wife as spontaneous-market-like guarantor.