Diego Gambetta (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdjеːɡo ɡamˈbetta]; born 1952) is an Italian-born social scientist.
[2] He was first junior and then senior research fellow at King's College, Cambridge, from 1984 to 1991.
In 2002, he was awarded a title of distinction as professor of sociology and in 2003 he became an official fellow of Nuffield College.
In his book The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (published by Harvard University Press in 1993), he brings a new perspective on an extralegal institution like the Mafia by underscoring the market demand for protection that it satisfies and by showing how mafiosi apparently outlandish rituals and behaviours make organisational sense.
His approach has had much influence on the study of mafia-like organisations around the world – it has been applied to cases in Russia,[5] Hong Kong,[6] Japan [7] Bulgaria[8] and Mainland China[9] – and more generally on the study of extra-legal governance[10] as well as Mafia Transplantation.
His subsequent work in this area, with the late economist Michael Bacharach,[12] employs game theory to provide a rigorous definition of trust, and signalling theory to understand the nature of trust decisions.
After an imaginative application of the theory to how taxi drivers in dangerous cities decide whether to take on board hailers and callers[14] on the basis of little information, his book Codes of the Underworld.
Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, among the first and few to write on the economics of organised crime, wrote that the book "illuminates a vast field of strategic communication where trust cannot be taken for granted.
There is nothing comparable in print, and the book's interpretations will carry well beyond the field of conventional crime.
A number of Gambetta's research questions have come from "puzzles", unexpected or counter-intuitive correlations, such as the presence of a large proportion of engineers among Islamic radicals.
In 2005 he edited “Making Sense of Suicide Missions” (published by Oxford University Press), and he is now working with Steffen Hertog on a book on “Engineers of Jihad” for Princeton University Press.
[18] In terms of direct intellectual influences on Gambetta's work, in addition to Thomas Schelling, one may count Michael Bacharach, Partha Dasgupta, Jon Elster and Bernard Williams.
The curious preference for low quality and its norms”, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, (with Gloria Origgi) 2010.
“Do strong family ties inhibit trust?”, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, 75, 3, 365–376 (with John Ermisch) 2009.
“‘Heroic impatience’: the Baader-Meinhof Gang 1968–1977”, Areté, 29, 11–34 (published in the US in The Nation, 22 March 2010).
Understanding Choice, Explaining Behaviour Essays in Honour of Ole-Jørgen Skog, Oslo: Unipub Forlag/Oslo Academic Press .
), Perspective on Imitation: From Cognitive Neuroscience to Social Science, Cambridge: MIT Press, vol II, pp. 221–241.
), Political Corruption of Transition: A Sceptic's Handbook, Budapest: Central European University Press, pp.
“In the beginning was the Word: the symbols of the mafia” Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XXXII, 1, 53–77 1988.