Trust can be purchased at the price of commitment expenditure

Evidence

Presumably, each participant calculates the cost of such commitment and compares it to the ‘gains’ to him emanating from it. The cost of commitment is then the price that has to be paid for each party to trust the other to fulfil the terms of the agreement. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 840

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions trust within economic cost-benefit calculation, directly linking to Hardin’s ‘trust requires observable constraints on opportunistic behavior’ reading purpose.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the economic framing of trust-as-transaction central to the Luhmann/Hardin synthesis.