Membership Has its Privileges: Old and New Mafia Organizations

Abstract

What makes a country, or a geographical area, more likely to develop a mafia? At the beginning we find a large-scale shock to the social system that pushes it from a low-crime equilibrium without a mafia toward a high-crime equilibrium with a mafia. Following the shock, the necessary condition for the development of a mafia is the existence of a dynamic, which I call social contagion, similar to a technological lock-in. Indeed, the outbreak of a mafia-like organization creates a self-reinforcing process. Consequently, anti-mafia policies will be successful only if able to push the system back toward a low-crime mafia-free equilibrium. Unfortunately, however, if being a member of the mafia begins to emerge as the dominant choice, elimination of the organization becomes progressively more difficult as the necessary changes in relative returns to membership increase at an increasing rate.