A radio service was initiated in Palermo in the early 1980s, but individual drivers soon opted our, claiming that everyone else was cheating. "If I answer a call, someone else answers after me pretending to be closer," one driver complained. As a result, by 1987, in a city of over a million inhabitants, the number of radio-dispatched taxis was down to a handful, and service was foundering. Drivers in Palermo maintained that it was not possible to catch cheaters in flagrante, though whether because they could not be bothered with policing or because of some other constraint remained unclear.

XREF: Classic collective action and tragedy of the commons dynamic, resonates with Ostrom's design principles for governing commons and game-theoretic accounts of cooperation.

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 591