Mafia protection only emerges where territory can be cheaply monitored

Evidence

A more convincing hypothesis is that overseeing a large population of itinerant drivers following unpredictable routes may be too complex and expensive a chore for any central agent to have an interest in acting as guarantor. Likewise, drivers would be reluctant to pay someone other than themselves to do the enforcing, since policing can be efficiently conducted only by drivers themselves as they travel at random through the city, each one representing a potential threat to all the others. Anyone specializing in policing would have to have a large fleer of cars and agents dedicated to that task alone. Enforcing the protection of parking territories, which are both immobile and well defined, may be considerably simpler and cheaper. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 601

Categorization

• XREF: Directly tests Gambetta’s own protection-market model against a case where the Mafia abstains — an ideal probe on the boundary conditions of private protection.