Trust as a Commodity

Trust is central to all transactions and yet economists rarely discuss the notion. It is treated rather as background environment, present whenever called upon, a sort of ever-ready lubricant that permits voluntary participation in production and exchange. In the standard model of a market economy it is taken for granted that consumers meet their budget constraints: they are not allowed to spend more than their wealth. Moreover, they always deliver the goods and services they said they would. But the model is silent on the rectitude of such agents. We are not told if they are persons of honour, conditioned by their upbringing always to meet the obligations they have chosen to undertake, or if there is a background agency which enforces contracts, credibly threatening to mete out punishment if obligations are not fulfilled a punishment sufficiently stiff to deter consumers from ever failing to fulfil them. The same assumptions are made for producers. To be sure, the standard model can be extended to allow for bankruptcy in the face of an uncertain future. One must suppose that there is a special additional loss to becoming bankrupt a loss of honour when honour matters, social and economic ostracism, a term in a debtors’ prison, and so forth. Otherwise, a person may take silly risks or, to make a more subtle point, take insufficient care in managing his affairs, but claim that he ran into genuine bad luck, that it was Mother Nature’s fault and not his own lack of ability or zeal.