Flávio L. Pinheiro

NOVA IMS Universidade Nova de Lisboa · Information Management School

Social networks pervade our everyday lives: we interact, influence, and are influenced by our friends and acquaintances. With the advent of the World Wide Web, large amounts of data on social networks have become available, allowing the quantitative analysis of the distribution of information on them, including behavioral traits and fads. Recent st...

Adaptive social structures are known to promote the evolution of cooperation. However, up to now the characterization of the collective, population-wide dynamics resulting from the self-organization of individual strategies on a coevolving, adaptive network has remained unfeasible. Here we establish a (reversible) link between individual (micro)beh...

Countries and cities are likely to enter economic activities that are related to those that are already present in them. Yet, while these path dependencies are universally acknowledged, we lack an understanding of the diversification strategies that can optimally balance the development of related and unrelated activities. Here, we develop algorith...

Economic diversification—the process by which locations enter new economic activities—is known to be a combination of related and unrelated diversification. Related diversification is—on average—more frequent, but unrelated diversification is nevertheless considered important to avoid economic lock-in. Here, we study the frequency and timing of unr...

As regions evolve, their economies become more complex, and they tend to diversify into related activities. Although there is a bright side to this diversification process in terms of economic development, there may also be a dark side to it, as it possibly contributes to regional inequalities. The paper uses data on industries and patents to analy...

The labor market has transformed with the advent of the gig economy, characterized by short-term and flexible work arrangements facilitated by online platforms. As this trend becomes increasingly prevalent, it presents unique opportunities and challenges. In this manuscript, we comprehensively characterize the social networks of gig economy workers...

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) has shown that American liberals and conservatives rely on fundamentally different moral principles, offering a different perspective on the deepening political divide in US politics. However, results outside the US have been less clear, particularly in countries with a more diverse political landscape that does not f...

Tracking the evolution of discussions on online social spaces is essential to assess populations’ main tendencies and concerns worldwide. This paper investigates the relationship between topic evolution and speech toxicity on Twitter. We construct a Dynamic Topic Evolution Model (DyTEM) based on a corpus of collected tweets. To build DyTEM, we leve...

The labor market has transformed with the advent of the gig economy, characterized by short-term and flexible work arrangements facilitated by online platforms. As this trend becomes increasingly prevalent, it presents unique opportunities and challenges. In this manuscript, we comprehensively characterize the social networks of gig economy workers...

Unparalleled advances in information technology have resulted in the virtualization of the workplace, as well as in a surge in non-traditional work arrangements based on short-term contracts (“gigs”). Work that is done remotely through online platforms may be hidden by technology. Thus, how could we possibly access information about the social netw...

Fraud, corruption, and collusion are the most common types of crime in public procurement processes; they produce significant monetary losses, inefficiency, and misuse of the public treasury. However, empirical research in this area to detect these crimes is still insufficient. This article presents a systematic literature review focusing on the mo...

Purpose With the growing popularity of social media, it has become common practice for consumers to write online reviews to share their opinion and experience as well as consider others' reviews to inform purchase decision-making. This study investigated how online review sentiments towards four key aspects (food, service, ambience and price) chang...

Recent studies have found evidence of a negative association between economic complexity and inequality at the country level. Moreover, evidence suggests that sophisticated economies tend to outsource products that are less desirable (e.g. in terms of wage and inequality effects), and instead focus on complex products requiring networks of skilled...

Traditional methods used in education sciences often disregard the underlying complexity of the educational system and consequently its emergence phenomena. Underlying complex systems, there is a rich web of interconnected components that determine the relational properties of the system. Here, we argue that an interconnected vision of educational...

Public procurement fraud is a plague that produces significant economic losses in any state and society, but empirical studies to detect it in this area are still scarce. This article presents a review of the most recent literature on public procurement to identify techniques for fraud detection using Network Science. Applying the PRISMA methodolog...

Public procurement refers to the purchase by public sector entities—such as government departments or local authorities—of Services, Goods, or Works. It accounts for a significant share of OECD countries’ expenditures. However, while governments are expected to execute them as efficiently as possible, there is a lack of methodologies for an adequat...

The recent restrictions on mobility and economic activities imposed by governments due to the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly affected waste production and recycling patterns in cities worldwide. This effect differed both between cities and within cities as the measures of confinement adopted by governments had diverse impacts in different are...

One of the most difficult tasks that economies face is how to generate economic growth without causing environmental damage. Research in economic complexity has provided new methods to reveal structural constraints and opportunities for green economic diversification and sophistication, as well as the effects of economic complexity on environmental...

Fraud in public funding can have deleterious consequences for societies’ economic, social, and political well-being. Fraudulent activity associated with public procurement contracts accounts for losses of billions of euros every year. Thus, it is of utmost relevance to explore analytical frameworks that can help public authorities identify agents t...

Research in Data Envelopment Analysis has created rankings of the ecological efficiency of countries' economies. At the same time, research in economic complexity has provided new methods to depict productive structures and has analyzed how economic diversification and sophistication affect environmental pollution indicators. However, no research s...

Fraud in public funding can have deleterious consequences for the economic, social, and political well-being of societies. Fraudulent activity associated with public procurement contracts accounts for losses of billions of euros every year. Thus, it is of utmost relevance to explore analytical frameworks that can help public authorities identify ag...

Development studies on the middle-income trap have highlighted the challenges for developing economies to transform their productive systems from simple towards high value-added activities. Here, we use trade data of 116 countries to quantify the stages of productive sophistication and reveal the critical phase that countries encounter at intermedi...

The exploration of different behaviours is part of the adaptation repertoire of individuals to new environments. Here, we explore how the evolution of cooperative behaviour is affected by the interplay between exploration dynamics and social learning, in particular when individuals engage on prisoner’s dilemma along the edges of a social network. W...

Public procurement accounts for a significant share of OECD countries' expenditures. Therefore, governments and public institutions are expected to execute them as efficiently as possible. Yet, there is a lack of methods that allow for an adequate comparison of procurement activity between institutions at different scales, representing a challenge...

Diffusion on complex networks is often modeled as a stochastic process. Yet, recent work on strategic diffusion emphasizes the decision power of agents [1] and treats diffusion as a strategic problem. Here we study the computational aspects of strategic diffusion, i.e., finding the optimal sequence of nodes to activate a network in the minimum time...

Development studies on the middle-income trap have highlighted the challenges for developing economies to transform their productive systems from simple towards high value-added activities. Here, we use trade data of 116 countries to quantify the stages of productive sophistication and reveal the critical phase that countries encounter at intermedi...

Research on economic complexity has shown that a country’s type of exports conditions its future path of economic diversification and economic growth. Yet little emphasis has been put on the inequality associated with the types of products traded between countries and different regions of the world. Here we analyze the income inequality associated...

Data on the applicants’ revealed preferences when entering higher education is used as a proxy to build the Higher Education Space (HES) of Portugal (2008–2015) and Chile (2006–2017). The HES is a network that connects pairs of degree programs according to their co-occurrence in the applicants’ preferences. We show that both HES network structures...

The impact of non-government organizations (NGOs) on the local development of rural areas has rarely been explored empirically. Here, we employ methods from network science to evaluate the impact of an NGO’s activities on the social capital and innovation of three Peruvian farming communities between 2003 and 2018. Data were collected from in-depth...

The rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that often cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. Complex contagion happens in the diffusion of human behaviours, innovations and knowledge. Based on that evidence, we propose a model that consi...

A country’s productive structure determines its future path of economic diversification, economic growth, and income inequality. In this article, we identify Paraguay’s structural constraints and opportunities for economic diversification and inclusive growth. For this purpose, we advance methods from research on economic complexity and the product...

The impact of Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) on the local development of rural areas has rarely been explored empirically. Here we employ methods from network science to evaluate the impact of an NGO's activities on the social capital and innovation of three Peruvian farming communities between 2003 and 2018. Data was collected from in-depth i...

Research on economic complexity has shown that a country’s type of exports conditions its future path of economic diversification and economic growth. Yet little emphasis has been put on the inequality associated with the types of products traded between countries and different regions of the world. Here we analyze the income inequality associated...

The impact of Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) on the local development of rural areas has rarely been explored empirically. Here we employ methods from network science to evaluate the impact of an NGO’s activities on the social capital and innovation of three Peruvian farming communities between 2003 and 2018. Data was collected from in-depth i...

In many situations, the rate of adoption of new information depends on reinforcement from multiple sources in a way that cannot be described by simple contagion processes. In such cases, contagion is said to be complex. This has been found in the diffusion of human behaviors, innovations, and knowledge. Based on that evidence, we propose a new mode...

Although many factors are known to determine students’ choices when entering Higher Education, it is still unclear how individual choices relate to organizing principles of Higher Education systems. Here, we contribute to address this gap by introducing the Higher Education Space (HES), a network that captures the interdependence structure between...

The diffusion of information has been widely modeled as stochastic diffusion processes on networks. Alshamsi et al. (2018) proposed a model of strategic diffusion in networks of related activities. In this work we investigate the computational aspects of finding the optimal strategy of strategic diffusion. We prove that finding an optimal solution...

Little is known about the structural patterns and dynamics of the first global trading market (FGTM), which emerged during the sixteenth century as a result of the Iberian expansion, let alone how it compares to today’s global financial markets. Here we build a representative network of the FGTM using information contained in 8725 (handwritten) Bil...

Supplementary Material to Structural and temporal patterns of the first global trading market

Designing mechanisms that leverage cooperation between agents has been a long-lasting goal in Multiagent Systems. The task is especially challenging when agents are selfish, lack common goals and face social dilemmas, i.e., situations in which individual interest conflicts with social welfare. Past works explored mechanisms that explain cooperation...

Designing mechanisms that leverage cooperation between agents has been a long-lasting goal in Multiagent Systems. The task is especially challenging when agents are selfish, lack common goals and face social dilemmas, i.e., situations in which individual interest conflicts with social welfare. Past works explored mechanisms that explain cooperation...

It is well known that countries tend to diversify their exports by entering products that are related to their current exports. Yet this average behavior is not representative of every diversification path. In this paper, we introduce a method to identify periods when countries enter relatively more unrelated products. We analyze the economic diver...

It is well known that countries tend to diversify their exports by entering products that are related to their current exports. Yet this average behavior is not representative of every diversification path. In this paper, we introduce a method to identify periods when countries enter relatively more unrelated products. We analyze the economic diver...

It is well known that countries tend to diversify their exports by entering products that are related to their current exports. Yet this average behavior is not representative of every diversification path. In this paper, we introduce a method to identify periods when countries enter relatively more unrelated products. We analyze the economic diver...

Complex networks impact the diffusion of ideas and innovations, the formation of opinions, and the evolution of cooperative behavior. In this context, heterogeneous structures have been shown to generate a coordination-like dynamics that drives a population towards a monomorphic state. In contrast, homogeneous networks tend to result in a stable co...

What is the most effective way to spread a behavior on a network? The recent literature on network diffusion has focused mostly on models of simple contagion---where contagion can result from contact with a single "infected" individual---and complex contagion---where contagion requires contact with multiple "infected" sources. While in the case of...

In 1990, Germany began the reunification of two separate research systems. In this study, we explore the factors predicting the East-West integration of academic fields by examining the evolution of Germany's co-authorship network between 1974 and 2014. We find that the unification of the German research network accelerated rapidly during the 1990s...

Many problems of cooperation involve repeated interactions among the same groups of individuals. When collective action is at stake, groups often engage in Public Goods Games (PGG), where individuals contribute (or not) to a common pool, subsequently sharing the resources. Such scenarios of repeated group interactions materialize situations in whic...

Countries and citizens often raise significant expectations every time a new International Environmental Summit is settled. Unfortunately, few solutions have come out of these meetings. This represents a challenge on our current understanding of models on decision-making: more effective levels of discussion, agreements and coordination must become...

Complex networks are ubiquitous and known to pro-foundly affect the processes that take place on them. From a theoretical perspective, some of the most complex pro-cesses studied to date, occurring on complex networks, are related with behavioural dynamics and decision-making, of-ten described by means of social dilemmas of cooperation. Among these...

The conundrum of cooperation has received increasing attention during the last decade. In this quest, the role of altruistic punishment has been identified as a mechanism promoting cooperation. Here we investigate the role of altruistic punishment on the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in structured populations exhibiting connectivity patt...

In many real-life situations, the completion of a task by a group toward achieving a common goal requires the cooperation of at least some of its members, who share the required workload. Such cases are conveniently modeled by the N-person snowdrift game, an example of a Public Goods Game. Here we study how an underlying network of contacts affects...

When members of a population engage in dyadic interactions reflecting a prisoner’s dilemma game, the evolutionary dynamics depends crucially on the population structure, described by means of graphs and networks. Here, we investigate how selection pressure contributes to change the fate of the population. We find that homogeneous networks, in which i...

Social networks affect in such a fundamental way the dynamics of the population they support that the global, population-wide behavior that one observes often bears no relation to the agent processes it stems from. Up to now, linking the global networked dynamics to such agent mechanisms has remained elusive. Here we define an observable dynamic an...

Social networks affect in such a fundamental way the dynamics of the population they support that the global, population-wide behavior that one observes often bears no relation to the individual processes it stems from. Up to now, linking the global networked dynamics to such individual mechanisms has remained elusive. Here we study the evolution o...

Humans contribute to a broad range of cooperative endeav-ors. In many of them, the amount or effort contributed often depends on the social context of each individual. Recent evidence has shown how modern societies are grounded in complex and heterogeneous networks of exchange and cooperation, in which some individuals play radically dif-ferent rol...

Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that promote and maintain cooperative behavior is recognized as a major theoretical problem where the intricacy increases with the complexity of the participating individuals. This is epitomized by the diverse nature of Human interactions, contexts, preferences and social structures. Here we discuss how soc...