Market-sharing cartels need practical mechanisms like queues and turns

Evidence

Even sharing customers, however, can prove difficult. There may simply be too many customers, or too few, or they may be too mobile and thus difficult to identify. How, say, could restaurants share diners or gas stations share drivers? Sharing customers is equally meaningless if there is only one buyer, or at any rare if there are fewer buyers than sellers. One strategy for dealing with these problematic extremes involves taking turns. Provided they can be funneled through particular locations, queuing can help dealing with too many customers. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 529

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the concrete mechanics — queuing, turns, repeated transactions — that make customer-sharing feasible, which is the fine-grained institutional detail the reader wants.
• XREF: connects to: Traders manipulate spreads, delays, and prices within a status-governed relational market. — Karin Knorr Cetina & Urs Bruegger, Global Microstructures: The Virtual…, 117