The mafia’s subcultural system is economically a self-perpetuating equilibrium

Evidence

In the work of Henner Hess, however, the subcultural system closely resembles the more useful concept of equilibrium common in economics, that is, a self-perpetuating state of affairs in which agents have an individual interest in behaving in ways which support it and have no interest in deviating from that behavior even if collectively they might attain a superior state. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 772

Categorization

• DEFINE: Equilibrium framed as a self-perpetuating state where individual incentives lock in collect- ively suboptimal behavior — the canonical rational-choice definition.
• XREF: Mirrors Milgrom et al. on how one-shot strategic games lock rational players into collectively worse outcomes; Schellingesque coordination equilibria.