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gjm comments on Counterfactual trade - Less Wrong Discussion
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What does "the counterfactual in which your positions are reversed" actually mean? Suppose I'm a white slaveowner in the early 19th-century US, pondering how I should treat my slaves. It's hard to see that there's any possible world that resembles this one except that I am a slave and the person who is now my slave is the owner (because the societal mechanisms that make some people slaves and some slaveowners are slanted in particular ways and there's no plausible way our positions could be interchanged without also making us utterly different people).
(For the avoidance of doubt: I do not in any way endorse slavery and I'd love to believe that counterfactual-me wouldn't be willing to be a slaveowner even in the early 19th-century US. It's just a useful example.)
Good question. It is definitely underspecified (this is true of many counterfactuals as people think about them).
Where it's harder to get counterfactuals to work, this is likely to make them less salient, which means people are going to be less confident of having trade partners, so less likely to engage in trade (needing a better reward/cost ratio, I suppose).
Note that you can potentially trade with counterfactuals that aren't strongly symmetric. You can trade with a counterfactual where the person who is your slave is in a position of power over you, even if that's not an owner/slave relationship.