Ignorance, trust, opportunism and efficiency

Trust can result in the saving of information costs. This statement does not answer the question of when it is sensible and necessary to trust others, or when this trust should be legally protected, when one should obtain the information necessary for a decision oneself and when others should be provided with incentives to produce and transfer valuable information to others. Legal scholarship has dealt intensively with questions of trust and the protection of trust. However, it has not sufficiently analysed the close connection between the overall problem of obtaining and transmitting information and the question of the protection of confidence. Information economics attempts to incorporate behaviours such as trust, cooperation, and reciprocal altruism into economic theory. Therefore, some of these developments will be presented below, provided that they can be used to analyse legal problems, especially under what conditions legal norms should protect or not protect trust.