Diego Gambetta
Biographic Data
| ID | 136544 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diego Gambetta |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diego |
| FAMILY NAME | Gambetta |
| SIGNATURE | GAMBETTA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Collegio Carlo Alberto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1655-6615 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 439 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Fight, Flight, Mimic: Identity Mimicry in Conflict
This edited volume is the first systematic study of deceptive mimicry in the context of wars. Deceptive mimicry—the manipulation of individual or group identity—includes passing off as a different individual, as a member of a group to which one does not belong, or, for a group, to ‘sign’ its action as another group. Mimicry exploits the reputation of the model it mimics to avoid capture (flight), to strike undetected at the enemy (fight), or to h…
Trust and Strength of Family Ties: New Experimental Evidence
We provide a conceptual replication of an experimental study that uncovered a robust correlation between the strength of individuals’ family ties and their distrust of strangers, striving to establish whether the link is causal. Using a different subjects pool and an online setting, we repeat the binary trust-game experiment from Ermisch and Gambetta and enrich it by manipulating the payoffs to create a low-trust and high-trust environment. The k…
Commitment through Sacrifice: How Longer Ramadan Fasting Strengthens Religiosity and Political Islam
Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spur…
The Politics behind the Veil
Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey's Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is high…
Sharing Compromising Information as a Cooperative Strategy
Well-enforced norms create an opportunity for norm breakers to cooperate in ventures requiring trust. This is realized when norm breakers, by sharing evidence of their breaches, make themselves vulnerable to denunciation and therefore trustworthy. The sharing of compromising information (SCI) is a strategy employed by criminals, politicians, and other actors wary of their partners’ trustworthiness in which the cost of ensuring compliance is offlo…
At the Root of the North–South Cooperation Gap in Italy: Preferences or Beliefs
The marked difference in the development of the North and the South of Italy represents a prototypical case of seemingly intractable within-country disparities. Recent research found that a plausible determinant of this socio-economic gap would be a difference in the ability to cooperate. Through a laboratory experiment we investigate whence this difference derives, whether from different preferences or from different beliefs. Our findings indica…
Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education
Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education
The violent actions of a few extremists can alter the course of history, yet there persists a yawning gap between the potential impact of these individuals and what we understand about them. In Engineers of Jihad , Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog uncover two unexpected facts, which they imaginatively leverage to narrow that gap: they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist a…
Income and Trustworthiness
We employ a behavioral measure of trustworthiness obtained from a trust game carried out with a sample of the general British population, the individuals of which were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. Our basic finding is that given past income, higher current income increases trustworthiness and, given current income, higher past income reduces trustworthiness. Past income determines the level of financial aspirations, and whether o…
Amoral Familism, Social Capital, or Trust? The Behavioural Foundations of the Italian North-South Divide
We present the first laboratory-in-the field experiment on the Italian North-South divide. Using a representative sample of the population, we measure whether regional disparities in ability to cooperate emerge even if differences in geography, institutions and criminal intrusion are silenced. We report that a behavioural gap in cooperation exists: Northern and Southern citizens react differently to the same incentives. Moreover, this gap cannot …
Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection Between Violent Extremism and Education
Behind the Veil: The Strategic Use of Religious Garb
There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countri…
Thick as thieves: Homophily and trust among deviants
Individuals who engage in deviant behaviors are more likely to be friends with other deviants compared to non-deviants. This pattern has been observed across different types of deviant activities and among different age groups. In question, however, is the mechanism that underlies this pattern. In this article we develop and test a new theory to explain homophily among deviants. Deviance makes one vulnerable to the risk of being caught and sancti…
The LL game: The curious preference for low quality and its norms
We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in…
Signaling
This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cos…
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
How do criminals communicate with each other? Unlike the rest of us, people planning crimes can't freely advertise their goods and services, nor can they rely on formal institutions to settle disputes and certify quality. They face uniquely intense dilemmas as they grapple with the basic problems of whom to trust, how to make themselves trusted, and how to handle information without being detected by rivals or police. In this book, one of the wor…
Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals
This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors - engineers' relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset - is the most …
Making Sense of Suicide Missions
This book attempts to shed light on suicide missions and provide answers to the questions we all ask. Are these the actions of aggressive religious zealots and unbridled, irrational radicals or is there a logic driving those behind them? Are their motivations religious or has Islam provided a language to express essentially political causes? How can the perpetrators remain so lucidly effective in the face of certain death? And do these disparate …
Making Sense of Suicide Missions
“Claro!”: An Essay on Discursive Machismo
Among coachmen, as among us all, whoever starts shouting at others with the greatest self-assurance, and shouts first, is right.Lev Tolstoy
The Economics of Organised Crime
This is the first book to use economic theory in the analysis of all the different aspects of organised crime: the origins, the internal organisation, market behaviour and deterrence policies. The theory of rent-seeking is adopted to help understand the origin of criminal organisations from a state of anarchy, while modern industrial organisation theory is used to explain the design of internal rules in the organised crime sector. The market beha…
The rhetoric of reform revealed (or: (If you bite the ballot it may bite back)
The article assesses the effects, direct and indirect, intended and unintended, of the 1993 national electoral reform and the results of the 1994 general elections in Italy. It shows that the new system is not an eccentric compromise, and that those who forecast either its unworkability or its evil consequences were mistaken. However, in evaluating the success of the reform with respect to the ambitions which were held for it, it concludes that t…
The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
Inscrutable Markets
Unlike markets that are subject to asymmetric information, in inscrutable markets-such as religions and psychotherapies-not just buyers but sellers too do not know much about the quality of their products. Because buyers cannot discern which products are of good quality and sellers cannot construct "honest" signals to guide them, rational choice theory predicts their failure. Yet these markets emerge. The hypothesis of this article is that suppli…
Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations
Amoral Familism, Social Capital, or Trust? The Behavioural Foundations of the Italian North-South Divide
We present the first laboratory-in-the field experiment on the Italian North-South divide. Using a representative sample of the population, we measure whether regional disparities in ability to cooperate emerge even if differences in geography, institutions and criminal intrusion are silenced. We report that a behavioural gap in cooperation exists: Northern and Southern citizens react differently to the same incentives. Moreover, this gap cannot …
Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations
Fragments of an economic theory of the mafia
We know much and understand little about the Italian mafia. The amount of factual information surrounding it-whatever that 'it' may be-is disproportionately and dramatically greater than our theoretical understanding of this elusive entity. We do not know everything it might be interesting to know, of course, yet in the monumental quantity of scholarly and judicial sources devoted to the mafia, we can find far more information than scholars have …
The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals
This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors - engineers' relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset - is the most …
The Politics behind the Veil
Using a natural experiment, we find that in provinces where Turkey's Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) just won the election in 2004, women, including those who are weakly religious or non-religious, now veil far more than in provinces in which AKP just lost, the more so the poorer they are. This effect, as we predict, does not occur for praying regularly which is more costly and harder to observe practice. We argue that veiling is high…
At the Root of the North–South Cooperation Gap in Italy: Preferences or Beliefs
The marked difference in the development of the North and the South of Italy represents a prototypical case of seemingly intractable within-country disparities. Recent research found that a plausible determinant of this socio-economic gap would be a difference in the ability to cooperate. Through a laboratory experiment we investigate whence this difference derives, whether from different preferences or from different beliefs. Our findings indica…
Inscrutable Markets
Unlike markets that are subject to asymmetric information, in inscrutable markets-such as religions and psychotherapies-not just buyers but sellers too do not know much about the quality of their products. Because buyers cannot discern which products are of good quality and sellers cannot construct "honest" signals to guide them, rational choice theory predicts their failure. Yet these markets emerge. The hypothesis of this article is that suppli…
Godfather's gossip
My attention to gossip as a notion worthy of reflection was attracted by a trivial detail: the English etymology of gossip isgod-sib, godfather, or, generally, god parent, 'denoting-says the English Oxford Dictionary-the spiritual affinity of the baptized and their sponsor'. This intriguing origin alludes to gossip as the performing of an initiation ritual, the creation of an exclusive bond; above all, it bears an uncanny association with the maf…
Commitment through Sacrifice: How Longer Ramadan Fasting Strengthens Religiosity and Political Islam
Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spur…
Sharing Compromising Information as a Cooperative Strategy
Well-enforced norms create an opportunity for norm breakers to cooperate in ventures requiring trust. This is realized when norm breakers, by sharing evidence of their breaches, make themselves vulnerable to denunciation and therefore trustworthy. The sharing of compromising information (SCI) is a strategy employed by criminals, politicians, and other actors wary of their partners’ trustworthiness in which the cost of ensuring compliance is offlo…
Behind the Veil: The Strategic Use of Religious Garb
There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countri…
Thick as thieves: Homophily and trust among deviants
Individuals who engage in deviant behaviors are more likely to be friends with other deviants compared to non-deviants. This pattern has been observed across different types of deviant activities and among different age groups. In question, however, is the mechanism that underlies this pattern. In this article we develop and test a new theory to explain homophily among deviants. Deviance makes one vulnerable to the risk of being caught and sancti…
Making Sense of Suicide Missions
Income and Trustworthiness
We employ a behavioral measure of trustworthiness obtained from a trust game carried out with a sample of the general British population, the individuals of which were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. Our basic finding is that given past income, higher current income increases trustworthiness and, given current income, higher past income reduces trustworthiness. Past income determines the level of financial aspirations, and whether o…
The LL game: The curious preference for low quality and its norms
We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in…
The rhetoric of reform revealed (or: (If you bite the ballot it may bite back)
The article assesses the effects, direct and indirect, intended and unintended, of the 1993 national electoral reform and the results of the 1994 general elections in Italy. It shows that the new system is not an eccentric compromise, and that those who forecast either its unworkability or its evil consequences were mistaken. However, in evaluating the success of the reform with respect to the ambitions which were held for it, it concludes that t…
Decision mechanisms: Educational choices in Italy
Trust and Strength of Family Ties: New Experimental Evidence
We provide a conceptual replication of an experimental study that uncovered a robust correlation between the strength of individuals’ family ties and their distrust of strangers, striving to establish whether the link is causal. Using a different subjects pool and an online setting, we repeat the binary trust-game experiment from Ermisch and Gambetta and enrich it by manipulating the payoffs to create a low-trust and high-trust environment. The k…
Signaling
This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cos…
Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations
A multidisciplinary study of trust. The papers in this publication address the question of what generates, maintains, substitutes or collapses trusting relations
Decision mechanisms: Educational choices in Italy
Were They Pushed or Did They Jump?: Individual Decision Mechanisms in Education
This book explores the factors which govern the range of educational decisions confronting individuals between compulsory school education and university. The data on which it draws come from two surveys conducted in north-west Italy, one of unemployed young people and one of high-school pupils. The author is in effect testing the two fundamental and opposed paradigms of explanation which are generally applied in the sociology of education; one w…
Fragments of an economic theory of the mafia
We know much and understand little about the Italian mafia. The amount of factual information surrounding it-whatever that 'it' may be-is disproportionately and dramatically greater than our theoretical understanding of this elusive entity. We do not know everything it might be interesting to know, of course, yet in the monumental quantity of scholarly and judicial sources devoted to the mafia, we can find far more information than scholars have …
Trust: Making and breaking cooperative relations
A multidisciplinary study of trust. The papers in this publication address the question of what generates, maintains, substitutes or collapses trusting relations
Were They Pushed or Did They Jump? Individual Decision Mechanisms in Education
Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations
Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations
‘In the beginning was the Word…’ The symbols of the mafia
Most expressions and symbols associated with the mafia—indeed, the term mafia itself—are made up of an almost surrealist cocktail of bogus and genuine sources, mythical and prosaic characters, fiction and reality. Already in 1876, Franchetti was puzzling over ‘the tendency to turn a mafioso into a legendary type, a feeling natural enough indeed in a professor of literature, but much harder to explain in wealthy landowners...’ (p. 34)
Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations
Inscrutable Markets
Unlike markets that are subject to asymmetric information, in inscrutable markets-such as religions and psychotherapies-not just buyers but sellers too do not know much about the quality of their products. Because buyers cannot discern which products are of good quality and sellers cannot construct "honest" signals to guide them, rational choice theory predicts their failure. Yet these markets emerge. The hypothesis of this article is that suppli…
Godfather's gossip
My attention to gossip as a notion worthy of reflection was attracted by a trivial detail: the English etymology of gossip isgod-sib, godfather, or, generally, god parent, 'denoting-says the English Oxford Dictionary-the spiritual affinity of the baptized and their sponsor'. This intriguing origin alludes to gossip as the performing of an initiation ritual, the creation of an exclusive bond; above all, it bears an uncanny association with the maf…
The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
The Economics of Organised Crime
This is the first book to use economic theory in the analysis of all the different aspects of organised crime: the origins, the internal organisation, market behaviour and deterrence policies. The theory of rent-seeking is adopted to help understand the origin of criminal organisations from a state of anarchy, while modern industrial organisation theory is used to explain the design of internal rules in the organised crime sector. The market beha…
The rhetoric of reform revealed (or: (If you bite the ballot it may bite back)
The article assesses the effects, direct and indirect, intended and unintended, of the 1993 national electoral reform and the results of the 1994 general elections in Italy. It shows that the new system is not an eccentric compromise, and that those who forecast either its unworkability or its evil consequences were mistaken. However, in evaluating the success of the reform with respect to the ambitions which were held for it, it concludes that t…
The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection
“Claro!”: An Essay on Discursive Machismo
Among coachmen, as among us all, whoever starts shouting at others with the greatest self-assurance, and shouts first, is right.Lev Tolstoy
Making Sense of Suicide Missions
This book attempts to shed light on suicide missions and provide answers to the questions we all ask. Are these the actions of aggressive religious zealots and unbridled, irrational radicals or is there a logic driving those behind them? Are their motivations religious or has Islam provided a language to express essentially political causes? How can the perpetrators remain so lucidly effective in the face of certain death? And do these disparate …
Making Sense of Suicide Missions
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
How do criminals communicate with each other? Unlike the rest of us, people planning crimes can't freely advertise their goods and services, nor can they rely on formal institutions to settle disputes and certify quality. They face uniquely intense dilemmas as they grapple with the basic problems of whom to trust, how to make themselves trusted, and how to handle information without being detected by rivals or police. In this book, one of the wor…
Why are there so many Engineers among Islamic Radicals
This article demonstrates that among violent Islamists engineers with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries. We then test a number of hypotheses to account for this phenomenon. We argue that a combination of two factors - engineers' relative deprivation in the Islamic world and mindset - is the most …
Signaling
This article examines signaling theory as an element of analytical sociology, and particularly as an analytic framework for accounting for irrational behaviors. It first provides an overview of the basic principles of signaling theory, focusing on the distinction between signs and signals as well as the concepts of differential costs and differential benefits. It then considers various sources of signal costs, including receiver’s independent cos…
The LL game: The curious preference for low quality and its norms
We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in…
Thick as thieves: Homophily and trust among deviants
Individuals who engage in deviant behaviors are more likely to be friends with other deviants compared to non-deviants. This pattern has been observed across different types of deviant activities and among different age groups. In question, however, is the mechanism that underlies this pattern. In this article we develop and test a new theory to explain homophily among deviants. Deviance makes one vulnerable to the risk of being caught and sancti…
Engineers of Jihad: The Curious Connection between Violent Extremism and Education
The violent actions of a few extremists can alter the course of history, yet there persists a yawning gap between the potential impact of these individuals and what we understand about them. In Engineers of Jihad , Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog uncover two unexpected facts, which they imaginatively leverage to narrow that gap: they find that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background, and that Islamist a…
Income and Trustworthiness
We employ a behavioral measure of trustworthiness obtained from a trust game carried out with a sample of the general British population, the individuals of which were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. Our basic finding is that given past income, higher current income increases trustworthiness and, given current income, higher past income reduces trustworthiness. Past income determines the level of financial aspirations, and whether o…
Political science (16 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · History (7 works)