Federico BianchiUniversity of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Social and Political Sciences
Federico Bianchi
Doctor of Philosophy
About
25
Publications
3,764
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
292
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Mainly interested in:
i) the link between economic exchange, solidarity, and conflict,
ii) peer-review evaluation in science,
iii) integrating Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) to Social Network Analysis (SNA).
Assistant professor of sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan (Italy), teaching Social Network Analysis to graduate students. Member of the Behave Lab. Associate Managing Editor of Sociologica - International Journal for Sociological Debate.
Additional affiliations
October 2020 - present
October 2019 - October 2019
SISEC School
Position
- Faculty Member
Description
- Social Network Analysis with R
September 2019 - September 2019
Behave Summer School on Agent-Based Modelling for Social Scientists
Position
- Faculty Member
Education
January 2014 - May 2017
Università degli Studi di Brescia, Università degli Studi di Milano, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale "Amedeo Avogadro"
Field of study
- Economic Sociology and Labour Studies
October 2010 - July 2013
October 2006 - April 2010
Publications
Publications (25)
This article investigates solidarity arising from economic exchange, by studying a multiplex network of collaboration, trust and social support. After a qualitative pre-study, we performed a full-network survey on a group of independent professionals sharing a coworking space and occasionally collaborating with each other. By running multivariate E...
This article examines the emergence of solidarity from interactions between professionals competing for collaboration. Research on multiplex collaboration networks has shown that economic exchange can elicit solidarity when mediated by trust but did not consider the effect of competition. To fill this gap, we built an agent-based model that simulat...
This article looks at 20 years of applications of agent-based models (ABMs) in sociology and, in particular, their explanatory achievements and methodological insights. These applications have helped sociologists to examine agent interaction in social outcomes and have helped shift analyses away from structural and aggregate factors, to the role of...
The effectiveness of public health measures to prevent COVID-19 contagion has required less vulnerable citizens to pay an individual cost in terms of personal liberty infringement to protect more vulnerable groups. However, the close relationship between scientific experts and politicians in providing information on COVID-19 measures makes it diffi...
Background
A previous meta-analysis (Kuiper et al., 2016) has shown that multiple aspects of social relationships are associated with cognitive decline in older adults. Yet, results indicated possible bias in estimations of statistical effects due to the heterogeneity of study design and measurements. We have updated this meta-analysis adding all r...
Research in social gerontology has suggested that structural complexity of personal networks could moderate cognitive decline of older adults. In line with the environmental complexity hypothesis, their cognitive functioning would benefit from a high number of cohesive subgroups in their own personal networks, i.e., various social foci, thanks to h...
Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) is a computational method used to examine social outcomes emerging from interaction between heterogeneous agents by computer simulation. It can be used to understand the effect of initial conditions on complex outcomes by exploring fine-grained (multiple-scale, spatial/temporal) observations on the aggregate consequences...
Stereotypes can contribute to the gender gap in STEM by shaping people’s expectations on their own and others’ performance. When gender is salient, expectations on task performance might reflect gender constructs even when information on individual abilities is available. We tested this hypothesis in a network study on students from ten high school...
Peer review is key for public trust of academic journals. It ensures that only rigorous research is published but also helps authors to increase the value of their manuscripts through feedback from reviewers. However, measuring the developmental value of peer review is difficult as it requires fine-grained manuscript data on various stages of the e...
Transparency and accountability are keywords in corporate business, politics, and science. As part of the open science movement, many journals have started to adopt forms of open peer review beyond the closed (single-or double-blind) standard model. However, there is contrasting evidence on the impact of these innovations on the quality of peer rev...
The Italian Society for Economic Sociology (SISEC) is a national association that aims to represent Italy-based scholars in economic sociology, the sociology of work and labour markets, and the sociology of organisations. Its last two conferences included rich and highly participated sessions on applications of Social Network Analysis (SNA). In its...
Contemporary West European shantytowns have essentially been studied with qualitative methods. Questions related to their ethnic structure, homophily and interaction with local institutions have not been analysed through large samples and survey data. Based on the example of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma living in shantytowns in the Parisian metropol...
Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review. Journals, funders and scholars must work together to create an infrastructure to study peer review.
Formalised models are simplified representations of empirical phenomena that help to abstract away essential mechanisms from details and contexts. Although (mathematical or computational) modelling has always had a contested status in the social sciences, the use of formalised models is key to integrate abstract theorisation and inductive empiricis...
While recent surveys show that most stakeholders recognise the importance of peer review to the publication process, there is a lack of systematic research on the topic. In a period of hyper-competition for resources, with perverse incentives that lead to academic capitalism and a “publish or perish” mentality, the lack of robust and cumulative res...
This paper presents an index that measures reviewer contribution to editorial processes of scholarly journals. Following a metaphor of ranking algorithms in sports tournaments, we created an index that considers reviewers on different context-specific dimensions, i.e., report delivery time, the length of the report and the alignment of recommendati...
This paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma through a game-theory frame-work. We built an agent-based model to estimate how much the quality of peer review isinfluenced by different resource allocation strategies followed by scientists dealing withmultiple tasks, i.e., publishing and reviewing. We assumed that scientists were sensitive...
This paper looks at the effect of multiple reviewers and their behavior on the quality and efficiency of peer review. By extending a previous model, we tested various reviewer behavior, fair, random and strategic, and examined the impact of selecting multiple reviewers for the same author submission. We found that, when reviewer reliability is rand...
The present work aims at criticising the foundationalist assumptions of Methodological Individualism (MI) in the social sciences by showing that they depend on one, but not necessarily the only, conception of the role of explanation in the construction of overall sociological theories. Philosophical arguments have been supplemented with a bird's-ey...
Azioni collettive politico-normative possono emergere da interazioni economiche? L'evidenza empirica suggerisce che azioni collettive di questo tipo siano generate dalla co-occorrenza di interessi condivisi e identità collettiva, neutralizzando potenziali comportamenti opportunistici. Una cornice teorica adeguata è offerta da un approccio esteso al...
Projects
Project (1)
SOCIABLE aims at studying the effect of the social infrastructure on the elder's cognition in Brescia through a cross-disciplinary perspective that looks at: (1) the characteristics of social networks and neighbourhood social capital that can help preserve cognitive abilities or eventually improve the cognitive reserve of the elderly; (2) the mechanisms through which these social factors may give rise to formal/informal community welfare services that help to manage cognitive diseases, including the facilitating function of the urban infrastructure. Looking at these factors comprehensively is key to explore complex, integrated, socially distributed processes of disease management, which might ensure higher resilience and sustainability of social structures against uncertainties and changes.
This integrative perspective on social, health and urban infrastructure is also instrumental to: (3) inform infrastructure designers, caregivers and service professionals about organisational processes that might reduce negative/magnify positive effects of social infrastructure assets on cognition, which a medicalization-oriented outlook tends to neglect;
(4) create a research-action platform that links local stakeholders to envisage, coordinate and enact socially and economically feasible organisational paths that help the elderly and his/her relatives to cope with uncertainties and fragilities.
