Unverifiable cheating collapsed Palermo’s radio taxi system by 1987.
Evidence
A radio service was initiated in Palermo in the early 1980s, but individual drivers soon opted our, claiming that everyone else was cheating. “If I answer a call, someone else answers after me pretending to be closer,” one driver complained. As a result, by 1987, in a city of over a million inhabitants, the number of radio-dispatched taxis was down to a handful, and service was foundering. Drivers in Palermo maintained that it was not possible to catch cheaters in flagrante, though whether because they could not be bothered with policing or because of some other constraint remained unclear. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 591
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Concrete narrative evidence for the reader’s private-enforcement framework: when cheating cannot be caught in flagrante, the market fails absent an arbitrator.
Related
- Palermo taxi drivers solved cheating by abandoning position reporting for fixed queues (similarity 0.87)
- Solving the cheating problem can come at a direct cost to consumers. (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Palermo taxi drivers solved cheating by abandoning position reporting for fixed queues
#responds-to(0.85) — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 605