Trusting cooperation persists only while the trusted party foresees future plays

Evidence

Let us suppose that after every audit, there will be about 4,500 rubles to play with and that Trifonov makes a generous profit from his investments, enough to yield 2,000 rubles to himself and a gift of 300 rubles to the lieutenant colonel. … Hence so long as he can foresee two more plays of the game beyond the current play, it always serves his interest to repay the money. Once the relationship is clearly over, however, and there is no longer any chance of reprisal, there is only a short-run gain from a single final loan, and that is substantially trumped by the gain from cheating and keeping the 4,500 rubles (plus any profit he has made from them). — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 116

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s stated integration goal: the endgame problem here (trust collapses when future interaction ends) is the mirror image of Saramago’s blindness collapse and of repeated-game conditions in Milgrom’s law merchant material.