Giangiacomo Bravo

• PhD Economic Sociology - University of Brescia - Italy
• Professor at Linnaeus University

Attitudes and expectations towards others are major drivers of political polarization. However, there is limited understanding of their relevance when decisions with high stakes are taken. In this study, we compare self-reported attitudes against economically incentivized estimates of data coming from official sources and offer participants financi...

Serious concerns have been raised on the potentially negative impact of public measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic on academic research, including the closure of research facilities, and the challenges of lockdown. However, it is unclear whether COVID-related mobility restrictions have penalized academic productivity, and if this is the case,...

Attitudes and expectations towards others are major drivers of political polarization, while little is known about actual differences in beliefs and behaviors between partisan groups. We designed an experiment where self-reported attitudes were contrasted with economically point estimates of official data where participants received an economic ben...

This piece arose from a Lorentz Center (Leiden) workshop on Agent Based Simulations for Societal Resilience in Crisis Situations held from 27 February to 3 March 2023 <https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/agent-based-simulations-for-societal-resilience-in-crisis-situations.html>. During the week, our group was tasked with discussing requirements for Agent-...

A dominant narrative in the climate change debate is that addressing population is not relevant for mitigation because population is only growing in the poorest countries, whose contribution to global carbon emissions is negligible, while the largest contribution comes from rich countries where the population no longer grows. We conducted an analys...

The relationship between environmental attitudes and behaviour is known to be weak, especially when these variables are measured as self-report items in surveys. In addition many environmental questions are highly polarised, making it even more problematic to use survey data to inform policy making. To better explore the attitude-behaviour gap in t...

Historical data are valuable resources for providing insights into general sociological patterns in the past. However , these data o en inform us at the macro-level of analysis but not about the role of individuals' behaviours in the emergence of long-term patterns. Therefore, it is difficult to infer 'how' and 'why' certain patterns emerged in the...

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an unusually high submission rate of scholarly articles. Given that most academics were forced to work from home, the competing demands for familial duties may have penalized the scientific productivity of women. To test this hypothesis, we looked at submitted manuscripts and peer review a...

Clear indicators and evaluation criteria are essential to keep humanity’s environmental impact within planetary boundaries. We introduce a new criterion based on two constraints, accounting for both ecological and human sustainability. The ecological constraint is defined through a novel indicator, the eco-balance, grounded on the well known concep...

In their studies of collective exploitation of common-pool resources, Ostrom and other scholars have stressed the importance of sanctioning as an essential method for preventing overuse and, eventually, the collapse of commons. However, most of the available evidence is based on data covering a relatively small period in history, and thus does not...

Human societies and natural ecosystems are under threat by growing populations, overexploitation of natural resources and climate change. This calls for more sustainable utilization of resources based on past experiences and insights from many different disciplines. Interdisciplinary approaches to studies of historical commons have potential to ide...

This article investigates the impact of the second national research assessment (VQR 2004–10), which was performed in 2011 by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes, on publication strategies by sociologists in Italy. We reconstructed all publications from Italian sociologists in Scopus between 2006 a...

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...

A key debate in the study on land, housing and natural resources revolves around the notion that general institutional forms (such as private, common, public, and likewise formal property rights) lead to a certain institutional performance (as may be expressed in terms of prices, transaction costs or sustainability). However, a modest, yet, growing...

Based on an online survey, this paper analyzes the attitude of detached house owners in Sweden toward future renovations and their perception over a one-stop-shop (OSS) service for deep renovation of these dwellings. With the aid of a house owners’ renovation decision-making journey for renovation, personal and contextual variables have been analyz...

Scholarly journals are often blamed for a gender gap in publication rates, but it is unclear whether peer review and editorial processes contribute to it. This article examines gender bias in peer review with data for 145 journals in various fields of research, including about 1.7 million authors and 740,000 referees. We reconstructed three possibl...

‘Fuel riots’ are a distinct type of energy-related conflict. We provide the first fuel riots database and explore their social, economic and environmental drivers. The analysis demonstrates links between fuel riots and high international crude oil prices in countries characterised by weak state capacity, deficient governance, fuel scarcity and poor...

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the submission rate to scholarly journals increased abnormally. Given that most academics were forced to work from home, the competing demands for familial duties might have penalised the scientific productivity of women. To test this hypothesis, we looked at submitted manuscripts and peer review ac...

Historical commons represent self-governed governance regimes that regulate the use and management of natural and man-made shared resources. Despite growing scientific interests, analyses of commons evolution and temporal dynamics are rare and drivers of change (birth, adaptation, dissolution) remain obscure. We apply an interdisciplinary approach...

Surveys measures of environmental concern are know to only weakly predict self-reported environmental behaviour. In addition, self-reported and actual behaviour may not match in empirical settings. To better explore the relation among these variables and the political stance of participants, we ran an online experiment with 805 US residents. Four k...

This paper defines ‘fuel riots’ as a distinct type of energy-related conflict. The paper provides the first database for fuel riots and explores their social, economic and environmental drivers. Focussing upon refined fuel commodities, the analysis demonstrates a link between fuel riots and rising international fuel prices in countries characterise...

This article examines gender bias in peer review with complete data on 145 journals in various fields of research, including about 1.7 million authors and 740,000 referees. We reconstructed three possible sources of bias, i.e., the editorial selection of referees, referee recommendations, and editorial decisions, and examined all their possible rel...

We present an analysis of regulatory activities in historical commons offering a unique picture of their long-term institutional dynamics. The analysis took into account almost 3,800 regulatory activities in eighteen European commons in two countries across seven centuries. Despite differences in time and space, we found a shared pattern where an i...

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.

We introduce a new criterion of sustainability given by the combination of two constraints. The first constraint is a condition of ecological sustainability based on a new indicator, the eco-balance, derived from the well known concept of ecological footprint and the new concept of population biodensity. The second constraint states that the averag...

This book presents the state-of-the-art in social simulation as presented at the Social Simulation Conference 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden. It covers the developments in applications and methods of social simulation, addressing societal issues such as socio-ecological systems and policy making. Methodological issues discussed include large-scale empir...

So far, there has been mixed evidence in the literature regarding the relationship between environmental attitudes and actual 'green' actions, something known as the attitude-behavior gap. This raises the question of when attitudes can actually work as a lever to promote environmental objectives, such as climate change mitigation, and, conversely,...

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...

Due to negative consequences of climate change for agriculture and food production shocks affecting different areas of the world, the past two decades saw the conditions of global food security increasingly worsen. This has resulted in negative consequences for the world economy, partly causing international food price spikes and social upheavals....

Institutions are key to avoid the “tragedy” of the commons where a shared resource is at risk of depletion due to the collective action problem underlying its management (Ostrom 1990). Therefore, understanding institutional forms and how they emerge and evolve over time is of crucial importance. This research used ABM to study the dynamics of insti...

In this paper, we examine factors affecting owners’ intention for renovation of their detached houses. Furthermore, we analyze their interest in choosing a one-stop-shop (OSS) service for the renovation, even though such a concept is not yet established in Sweden, but emerging in other parts of Europe. Our study is based on responses to an online q...

In order to convince both policy makers and the general public to engage in climate change mitigation activities, it is crucial to communicate the inherent risks in an effective way. Due to the complexity of the system, mitigation activities cannot completely rule out the possibility of the climate reaching a dangerous tipping point but can only re...

So far, there has been mixed evidence in the literature regarding the relation between environmental attitudes and actual ``green'' actions, something known as attitude-behavior gap. This raises the question of when attitudes can actually work as a lever to promote environmental objectives, such as climate change mitigation, and, conversely, when o...

To increase transparency in science, some scholarly journals are publishing peer review reports. But it is unclear how this practice affects the peer review process. Here, we examine the effect of publishing peer review reports on referee behavior in five scholarly journals involved in a pilot study at Elsevier. By considering 9,220 submissions and...

Humans behavior often varies depending on the opponent’s group membership, with both positive consequences (e.g., cooperation or mutual help) and negative ones (e.g., stereotyping, oppression, or even genocide). An influential model developed by Hammond and Axelrod (HA) highlighted the emergence of macrolevel “ethnocentric cooperation” from the agg...

In this paper, we identify the socioeconomic attributes and attitudes that have influenced house owners in renovating their homes in the past. Our study is based on responses to an online questionnaire survey of 971 house owners living in Kronoberg County in Sweden. Results showed that the interest and willingness of the house owners to perform a r...

The aim of this study was to investigate the opinion of authors on the overall quality and effectiveness of reviewers’ contributions to reviewed papers. We employed an on-line survey of thirteen journals which publish articles in the field of life, social or technological sciences. Responses received from 193 authors were analysed using a mixed-eff...

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...

Referrals and information flow distort market mechanisms of hiring in the labor market, but they might assist employers under asymmetric information in finding better alternatives. This paper investigates whether an impartial information flow between employers in a cyclic network structure could generate more discrimination than when no information...

Effective communication of risks involved in the climate change discussion is crucial and despite ambitious protection policies, the possibility of irreversible consequences actually occurring can only be diminished but never ruled out completely. We present a laboratory experiment that studies how residual risk of failure of climate change policie...

This paper aims to examine the influence of authors’ reputation on editorial bias in scholarly journals. By looking at eight years of editorial decisions in four computer science journals, including 7179 observations on 2913 submissions, we reconstructed author/referee-submission networks. For each submission, we looked at reviewer scores and estim...

Funding agencies and policy-makers have put increasing pressure on scientists to better clarify the usefulness of their research. It has been suggested that this may have led to an increased reflection on the societal relevance of research among the scientists themselves. However, this often is more an assumption than a carefully verified fact. Thi...

A appropriate bottom-up rule system can support the sustainability of common-pool resources such as forests and fisheries. The process that leads to the developments of such institutional settings requires the considerations of multiple social, physical, and institutional factors over long time horizons. In this paper, we present the SONICOM model...

The debate on the causes of conflict in human societies has deep roots. In particular, the extent of conflict in hunter-gatherer groups remains unclear. Some authors suggest that large-scale violence only arose with the spreading of agriculture and the building of complex societies. To shed light on this issue, we developed a model based on operato...

Model dynamics for different values of ??. (a) Global (whole nine-cell lattice) human population density in the migration scenario. (b) Global human population density in the no-migration scenario. (c) Local (single cell) human population density in the migration scenario, with the central cell selected as example. (d) Local human population densit...

Sensitivity analysis. This appendix presents an extended sensitivity analysis on the model. (PDF)

Model code. This appendix presents the Matlab code used for the numerical simulation. (PDF)

Model dynamics for different values of ??. (a) Global (whole nine-cell lattice) human population density in the migration scenario. (b) Global human population density in the no-migration scenario. (c) Local (single cell) human population density in the migration scenario, with the central cell selected as example. (d) Local human population densit...

Model dynamics for different values of the migration parameter ??. (a) Global human population density in the migration scenario. (b) Global human population density in the no-migration scenario. (TIF)

Computational social sciences (CSS) refer to computer-enabled investigations of human behaviour and social interaction. They include three main components — (i) computational modelling and social simulation, (ii) the analysis of digital traces of online interactions, (iii) virtual labs and online experiments — and allow researchers to perform studi...

In this paper we present an abstract replication of institutional emergence patterns observed in common pool resource (CPR) problems. We used the ADICO grammar of institutions as the basic structure to model both users’ strategies and institutions. Through an evolutionary process, users modify their behaviours and eventually establish a management...

The impact of resources on social unrest is of increasing interest to political leaders, business and civil society. Recent events have highlighted that (lack of) access to critical resources, including food, energy and water, can, in certain circumstances, lead to violent demonstrations. In this paper, we assess a number of political fragility ind...

Following previous agent-based research on peer review, this paper presents a game theory-inspired model that looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma. We tested different scientist behaviours and network topologies in order to understand their implications on the quality, efficiency and type of resource distribution in the science system. We...

Gender differences in cooperative choices and their neural correlates were investigated in a situation where reputation represented a crucial issue. Males and females were involved in an economic exchange (trust game) where economic and reputational payoffs had to be balanced in order to increase personal welfare. At the behavioral level, females s...

Humans often alter their behavior depending on the opponent's group membership, with positive (e.g., support of same-group members) or negative (e.g., stereotyping, oppression, genocide) consequences. An influential model developed by Hammond and Axelrod highlighted the emergence of macro-level "ethnocentric cooperation" from the aggregation of mic...

There is an ongoing debate on whether discrimination exists or not, and, if yes, in which forms. This chapter concentrates only on observed inequalities that are the direct consequences of hiring decisions. A variety of explanations have been provided to try to understand why discrimination tends to persist. A shift of focus toward psychological an...

The Human Sustainable Development Index (HSDI) has been proposed as a way to amend the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI) by adding an environmental dimension. Despite some attention in the media, the HSDI remained largely ignored by the scientific community. This paper aims at overcoming this issue by presenting an updated version of th...

The transport sector needs to go through an extended process of decarbonisation to counter the threat of climate change. Unfortunately, the International Energy Agency forecasts an enormous growth in the number of cars and greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Two issues can thus be identified: (1) the need for a new methodology that could evaluate the...

Any transition towards a more environmentally sustainable world will strongly depend on people's willingness to adopt the best available practices. We present here the Consumption Italy (CITA) model, an empirically grounded agent-based model designed to represent household consumption in Italy and to estimate the related greenhouse gas emissions un...

Commons dilemmas are interaction situations where a common good is provided or exploited by a group of individuals so that optimal collective outcomes clash with private interests. Although in these situations, social norms and institutions exist that might help individuals to cooperate, little is known about the interaction effects between positiv...

Although peer review is crucial for innovation and experimental discoveries in science, it is poorly understood in scientific terms. Discovering its true dynamics and exploring adjustments which improve the commitment of everyone involved could benefit scientific development for all disciplines and consequently increase innovation in the economy an...

Mast seeding is the synchronous production of large amounts of seeds at long intervals in plant populations. It is observed in several genera and its explanation remains controversial. To test one of the most popular hypotheses, predator satiation, we developed a virtual experiment based on an individual-based model reproducing the interaction betw...

La comprensione delle modalità attraverso cui gli attori econo-mici cooperano riducendo le asimmetrie informative e costruendo fiducia è cruciale soprattutto oggi dove i mercati sono sempre più globalizzati e le istituzioni formali di regolazione dell'inte-razione economica sembrano giocare un ruolo minore rispetto a meccanismi endogeni ed informal...

This compelling book offers a fresh and novel approach to study cultural and artistic expression from the perspective of 'the commons'. It demonstrates how identifying cultures as shared resources is useful in eliciting the main factors and social dilemmas affecting the production and evolution of cultural expression. © Enrico Bertacchini, Giangiac...

This article investigates the importance of the endogenous selection of partners for trust and cooperation in market exchange situations, where there is information asymmetry between investors and trustees. We created an experimental-data driven agent-based model where the endogenous link between interaction outcome and social structure formation w...

"The concept of the commons as a shared resource capable of yielding collective benefits to people is a well-established one in the social sciences, but its extension to jointly-owned cultural resources is relatively new. This pioneering book explores the idea of a cultural commons as it can be applied in a wide range of areas, including landscapes...

The possibility of exploiting multiple resources is usually regarded as positive from both the economic and the environmental point of view. However, resource switching may also lead to unsustainable growth and, ultimately, to an equilibrium condition which is worse than the one that could have been achieved with a single resource. We developed a d...

The joint exploitation of open-access natural resources is often modeled as a social dilemma with no escape for rational actors. Nevertheless, real individuals are not helplessly trapped in this dilemma and are often able to sustainably manage their commons by building endogenous institutions. This paper proposes both a simple analytical model and...

This paper studies the provision of public goods in open-source software support forums. Data from the Italian TeX Users Group were analysed to find individual motives for offering help. Using this methodology, we were able to split the forum participants into a small intrinsically motivated core group and a much larger group motivated mainly on th...

This paper investigates the relevance of reputation to improve the explorative capabilities of agents in uncertain environments. We have presented a laboratory experiment where sixty-four subjects were asked to take iterated economic investment decisions. An agent-based model based on their behavioural patterns replicated the experiment exactly. Ex...

Culture evolves following a process that is akin to biological evolution, although with some significant differences. At the same time culture has often a collective good value for human groups. This paper studies culture in an evolutionary perspective, with a focus on the implications of group definition for the coexistence of different cultures....

The importance of reputation in human societies is highlighted both by theoretical models and empirical studies. In this paper, we have extended the scope of previous experimental studies based on trust games by creating treatments where players can rate their opponents' behavior and know their past ratings. Our results showed that being rated by o...

This paper presents the results of laboratory experiments on the relevance of reputation for trust and cooperation in social interaction. We have extended a repeated investment game by adding new treatments where reputation is taken more explicitly into account than before. We then compared treatments where the investor and the trustee rate each ot...

This paper presents the results of some laboratory experiments on the relevance of reputation for the emergence of trust and cooperation in socio-economic interaction. We have extended a repeated investment game adding new treatments where reputation is taken more explicitly into account than in the present literature. We compare treatments where t...

Common-pool resources are natural or man-made resources shared among different users, a condition that produces a competition for their utilization leading often (although not necessarily) to their degradation or even to their destruction. This paper shortly discusses the "theory of the commons", as developed in the last 20 years by Elinor Ostrom a...

The joint exploitation of an open-access natural resource represents a social dilemma with no escape for rational actors. Nevertheless, real individuals are not harmlessly trapped in the dilemma and are often able to sustainably manage their commons thanks to the creation of endogenous institutions. The agent-based model presented here simulates th...

Common-pool resources are natural or man-made resources shared among different users, a condition that produces a competition for their utilization leading often (although not necessarily) to their degradation or even to their destruction. This paper shortly discusses the "theory of the commons", as developed in the last 20 years by Elinor Ostrom a...

The changing in the meaning of common resources together with the new consciousness regarding their importance show that, also in Europe (and in other economically highly-developed areas), the research on the commons is not only an issue for historians. It represents one of the key issues towards a better understanding for some of the major challen...

Common-pool resources are natural or man-made resources shared among different users, a condition that produces a competition for their utilization leading often (although not necessarily) to their degradation or even to their destruction. This paper shortly discusses the "theory of the commons", as developed in the last 20 years by Elinor Ostrom a...

Recent research suggests that consumption-based measures offer an insightful perspective on the debate on the relationship between economic growth and the environment. In this article we deepen the consumption-based line of inquiry by investigating the empirical evidence in support of the environmental Kuznets hypothesis using 2001 ecological footp...

Trust is an important concept that intersects a number of different disciplines, including economics, sociology, and political science, and maintains some meaning even in the natural sciences. Any situation where non-simultaneous exchanges between living organisms take place involves a problem of trust. We used computer simulations to study the evo...