Diego Gambetta

Diego Gambetta is an Italian-born social scientist known for applying rational choice theory and game theory to social phenomena including trust and organized crime, holding academic positions including the Carlo Alberto Chair at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin and a professorship of sociology at the University of Oxford. His 1993 book The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection, published by Harvard University Press and drawing on the confessions of former mafiosi, analyzed the Sicilian Mafia as a commercial enterprise supplying protection and enforcement of agreements in a society where distrust made ordinary contracts hard to enforce, rather than as simple organized violence. The book's framework, treating mafia-like organizations as a market response to weak or absent formal institutions of trust, has since been applied by other researchers to organized crime groups in Russia, Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere, making it one of the most widely cited social-scientific studies of organized crime.