Seminar

Mobsters beyond Rationality

Diego Gambetta
Collegio Carlo Alberto

Chairs
Juan Masullo & Andrea Ruggeri
University of Milan 

26 January 2026, h. 11:00
Seminar Room (Passione side)
Department of Social and Political Sciences
Via Conservatorio, 7 - Milan

Abstract
The risks of doing business in the underworld push criminals to behave with strict individual rationality. In theory, they should embody homo economicus at its rawest. This same pressure, however, makes it harder for them to build and sustain a well-functioning organisation: while indispensable for sustaining intra-criminal cooperation, an organisation demands a level of trust and loyalty that is hard for them to achieve. Here, I describe how the Sicilian Mafia relied on superstition and social norms to meet that challenge, deterring betrayals and buttressing its internal hierarchy.

Bio

Diego Gambetta is Carlo Alberto Chair in social and political science at Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, Italy, a Fellow of the British Academy, Quondam Fellow of All Souls College (Oxford), and Emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College (Oxford). In his career, he has addressed a host of challenging empirical questions, including why the Italian South been struggling to develop, what has kept the Sicilian mafia in business for so long, how can criminals trust each other, what makes people go on a suicide mission, and why we find a disproportionate number of engineers among violent Islamists, among others. In his work, he has made extensive use of game theory, in particular signalling theory, and a wide variety of methods, from ethnography to lab experiments.