I found this interesting: >Avellino’s mission was to rationalize the industry, to enforce what was called a “property rights” system among the carters. Individ

I found this interesting: >Avellino’s mission was to rationalize the industry, to enforce what was called a “property rights” system among the carters. Individual firms were allowed to compete for new customers. But, once a carter won a customer, he “owned” that business; the function of Avellino’s P.S.I. was to make sure that no one else poached that customer. It kind of reminded me of Peter Thiel's monopoly theory. At some point, competition for certain things becomes counter-productive. If the need is simple enough and adequately served, better to let it be served than waste energy undercutting and re-negotiating customers. There's a bigger world out there anyways. Obviously this colusion is all in the interest of the businessmen, rather than the customer. But the point stands in (at least how I interpret) Peter's mafia theory: don't get into a line of business where it's easy to poach customers and competition is incredibly fierce. Like the restaurant business in San Francisco. The antithesis of this is something like Palantir I suppose, selling specialized solutions to governments.