Perfectly competitive markets are theorized to require no trust or recurrent relationships.

Evidence

Economists as a rule have attached little importance to the role of such social ties as trust and friendliness in market exchange. As Albert Hirschman (1982) has observed, this can be explained by the fact that the ideal market upon which claims of allocative efficiency rest involves large numbers of price-taking anonymous buyers and sellers supplied with perfect information. With such markets there is no room for bargaining, negotiation, or mutual adjustment, and the operators that contract together need not enter into a recurrent or continuing relationship. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2470

Categorization

• XREF: Directly sets up the Luhmann/Hardin comparison: the anonymous-market ideal removes the observability and recurring contact on which real trust depends.
• DEFINE: Defines the economist’s competitive ideal precisely, establishing the baseline against which the subcontracting case is measured.