Customer preferences for strength and competition are internally contradictory

Evidence

Customers feel adequately protected only if their protector is at least as powerful as any other and guarantees to fend off all opponents. If this were not the case, they would not enter freely into a protection contract in the first place. At the same time, however, disappointed customers would prefer a competitive market, allowing them to change protectors easily. Unfortunately, these preferences are contradictory: if the former condition obtains, the latter cannot. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 840

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Gambetta/Milgrom mapping: explains why protection markets naturally tip toward monopoly, paralleling Schelling’s credible-commitment logic — customers must precommit to one strong protector even when disloyalty would suit them.
• QUESTION: This tension between guaranteed-strength and switchability is the mechanism that locks customers into a single protector; worth probing how the Godfather narrative dramatizes the impossibility of switching mid-contract.