Our chief problem is not maintenance in this sense but only the prevention of the collapse of our ongoing interaction in the face of anything that might disrupt it, such as sudden escalation of the stakes that lets one or the other of us treat the next round of our interaction as though it were part of a new, perhaps only one-shot, interaction. In such an interaction, the modest level of trustworthiness that we might have maintained through many iterations might no longer be enough to prevent opportunistic actions

XREF: Connects to game-theoretic work on iterated prisoner's dilemma and Axelrod's findings that repeated interactions sustain cooperation.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 663