Mafia bonds reduce to long-term protection contracts rather than sentiment

Evidence

It is clear that creating lasting bonds, as opposed to casual market exchanges, constitutes the usual organizational method of the mafia. These bonds overshadow even the economic dimension of protection, which is so fundamental to our understanding of how the mafia functions. In what follows I account for these bonds purely in terms of transactions involving long-term protection contracts, showing how the bonds can be rigorously reduced to transactions. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Gambetta’s reductionist move parallels Milgrom et al. reducing trust to repeated-transaction equilibria — the reader’s whole analytical frame.