Governance rules are efficient mechanisms in the sense that they increase people’s welfare. They emerge even when the state is unable or refuses to create and enforce them. We study a situation in which this demand for governance manifests itself through the emergence of property rights in illicit drug markets: a privately-provided governance. Specifically, we propose a model for property rights emergence in illicit drug markets as predicted by the theory on governance provided by prison gangs. It is studied a situation in which an agreement among criminals, resembling property rights enforceability on its allocative effect, can emerge in illicit drug markets. Our Mechanism Design approach shows that a change inside the prison system, from a competitive environment to the hegemony of a group of criminals, implies the equilibrium in illicit markets to shift from warfare to peace: the hegemonic group is shown to desire to promote the collusive agreement when it is able to do so. This contrasts with the equilibrium under no hegemony, in which the possibility to conquer consumers/territories drives violence up to a positive level. The novel empirical perspective implied by the model is explored using data from Brazil, a context for which the theory of governance provided by prison gangs has been pointed as a key explanation.

从提高人民福利的意义上讲，治理规则是有效的机制。即使国家无法或拒绝创建和执行它们，它们也会出现。我们研究了一种情况，在这种情况下，对管理的需求通过非法毒品市场中产权的出现而得以体现：私人提供的管理。具体而言，我们提出了一种由监狱帮派提供的治理理论所预测的在非法毒品市场中出现产权的模型。研究了一种情况，即在非法毒品市场上可能会出现罪犯之间达成协议，就其分配效力而言，类似于财产权的可执行性。我们的机制设计方法表明监狱系统内部的变化，从竞争环境到一群犯罪分子的霸权，意味着非法市场中的均衡已从战争转向和平：霸权集团表现出渴望促进共谋协议的意愿。能够做到。这与没有霸权的均衡形成对比，在均衡中，征服消费者/领土的可能性使暴力上升到一个积极的水平。该模型所隐含的新颖的经验视角是使用来自巴西的数据探索的，在这种情况下，监狱帮派提供的治理理论已被作为关键解释。