Protection sellers need continuous information on clients to gauge reliability

Evidence

If we want to offer our services convincingly to both the butcher and the vaccaro, the horse trader and the coachman, the first and foremost resource we need is information. We must make sure that we know enough about them—their businesses, their children, their wives, whether they are carrying any debt or credit, who their friends are, and so on—and that we keep such information updated. The reasons for this need are straightforward: we must have some idea of the objective constraints they are facing to be able to assess their reliability. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 94

Categorization

• XREF: Maps to Milgrom’s private judges needing full information about traders’ histories; same informational precondition for extralegal enforcement. — connects to: Insurance shifts from mitigating risk to eliminating it via continuous monitoring — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 668