Pier Luigi Sacco

Università degli Studi G. d'Annunzio Chieti e Pescara | UNICH · Department of Philosophical, Pedagogical and Economic-Quantitative Sciences

After the leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian corporation Mossack Fonseca, an intricate network of offshore business entities has been revealed. The emerging picture is that of legal entities, either individuals or companies, involved in offshore activities and transactions with several tax havens simultaneously which establish, indi...

Introduction: This study examines prospective associations within a 6-year perspective between three mind-stimulating leisure activities (relaxed and solitary: reading; serious and solitary: doing number and word games; serious and social: playing cards and games) and 21 outcomes in (1) physical health, (2) wellbeing, (3) daily life functioning, (4...

We analyze Donald J. Trump’s Twitter activity over the last months of the 2016 presidential campaign, his period as President Elect, and his Presidential term until Fall 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic. Trump weaponized social networks as a communication tool to build influence on the financial market and the public opinion. We re...

We investigate potential factors influencing token after-market returns to explain the extreme levels of underpricing experienced in the cryptocurrencies market. This research analyses a sample of 300 tokens issued between September 2015 and May 2018, fully capturing the window of maximum ICO activity. The results confirm the presence of significan...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

The infection caused by SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is characterized by an infectious period with either asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic phases, leading to a rapid surge of mild and severe cases putting national health systems under serious stress. To avoid their collapse, and in the absence of pharmacological treatments, dur...

The live streaming platform Twitch underwent in recent years an impressive growth in terms of viewership and content diversity. The platform has been the object of several studies showcasing how streamers monetize their content via a peculiar system centered around para-sociality and community dynamics. Nonetheless, due to scarcity of data, lots is...

In this brief report we followed the evolution of the COVID-19 Infodemic Risk Index during 2020 and clarified its connection with the epidemic waves, focusing specifically on their co-evolution in Europe, South America, and South-eastern Asia. Using 640 million tweets collected by the Infodemic Observatory and the open access dataset published by O...

The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such architecture with respect to the unilateral defection of single countries and the breakdown of single treaties is...

There is a socioeconomic threshold beyond which creative cities are at risk to become inaccessible to young, promising, but often low-income, cultural and creative professionals, thus undermining a major source of cultural dynamism. Building on this argument, scholars have increasingly weighed out the benefits of culture-led development. Yet, the l...

Within the conceptual framework of the Tightness-Looseness paradigm, we study the dynamics of the social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations across the 20 th century on the basis of the English Google Books corpus, by means of the construction of specific lexica of which we track their relative frequency. We fin...

We analyze the spatial-temporal dynamics of cultural vibrancy in the Swedish sub-region of Skaraborg. Our database consists of 4,170 geo-localized cultural activities and facilities, mapped between October 2013 and March 2014. We make use of the TWC methodology for the dynamic simulation of the evolution of geo-localized activity starting from an o...

We develop a computational approach to the analysis of cultural vibrancy and to the role of the cultural and creative sectors in the socio-economic organization of two districts of Western Kosovo, Gjakove and Peć. Our analysis is built on a geolocalized mapping of the cultural activities and facilities, and on the main socio-economic variables for...

We build an evolutionary game-theoretic model of the interaction between policymakers and experts in shaping the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Players’ decisions concern two alternative strategies of pandemic management: a “hard” approach, enforcing potentially unpopular measures such as strict confinement orders, and a “soft” approach,...

Background: Mental health problems among youth in low-resource countries are compounded by the limitations of societal stigma and the inaccessibility of traditional treatments. Therefore, there is a need to develop scalable, accessible, and stigma-free mental health interventions. We developed and tested Pre-Texts, an arts-literacy intervention tha...

In this paper we study the interdependences between the dynamics of the stock market indexes of 30 different stock markets across 29 different countries to analyze the nonlinear dynamics of their information flows. We find that the system exhibits complex dynamic properties that go beyond what has been generally found in the previous literature, su...

An extensive medical and occupational-health literature nds that an imbalance between eort and reward is an important stressor which produces serious health consequences. We incorporate these eects in a simple agency model with moral hazard and limited liability, and study the impact on agents' eort and utility, as well as incentive pay provision,...

Nowadays, the use of social networks (SNs) is pervasive and ubiquitous. Among other things, SNs have become a key resource for establishing and maintaining personal relationships, as further demonstrated by the emergence of the pandemic. However, easy access to SNs may be a source of addictive behaviour, especially among the younger population. The...

The link between culture and sustainable development has become a major research topic in the past few years. [...]

We study the effects of an article featured on the cover of the journal Nature on citations to all articles published by its authors. Based on 30 years of bibliometric data, we find that cover articles are cited significantly more than non-cover articles, with this difference being long-lasting. However, when considering all articles (past and futu...

Artistic interventions in the public domain are often legitimized as opportunities for the empowerment of local communities. However, the nature of such interventions is complex and cannot be inferred from stated intentions. The interaction between agents of cultural and artistic interventions and local communities is shaped by power relationships...

The governance of the political and economic world order builds on a complex architecture of international treaties at various geographical scales. In a historical phase of high institutional turbulence, assessing the stability of such architecture with respect to the unilateral defection of single countries and to the breakdown of single treaties...

After the leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian corporation Mossack Fonseca, an intricate network of offshore business entities has been revealed. The emerging picture is that of legal entities, either individuals or companies, involved in offshore activities and transactions with several tax havens simultaneously which establish, indi...

An infodemic - an outpouring of information, including misleading and also fake news - is accompanying the current pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2. In the absence of valid therapeutic approaches, behavioral responses may seriously affect the social dynamics of contagion, so the infodemic may cause confusion and disorientation in the public, leading t...

The vaccine equity crisis has an extra element that makes it crucial for our capacity to tackle future major societal challenges. Unlike most of these, including the climate one, the current pandemic causes major damage that is directly observable in the very short term, that is, within the political cycle of the incumbent policymakers. If not even...

The infection caused by SARS-CoV-2, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is characterized by an infectious period with either asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic phases, leading to a rapid surge of mild and severe cases putting national health systems under serious stress. To avoid their collapse, and in the absence of pharmacological treatments, dur...

We make use of an advanced artificial neural network (Auto-CM) to model the structure of the current world order as a data-driven reconstruction of the implicit relationships between countries and of their time evolution, as derived from a database of publicly observable socioeconomic and political variables. Building on previous research, we analy...

Fictional narratives cannot be considered as mere escapist entertainment, and have a significant social cognition potential. Their study is also important in understanding the mechanisms of behavioral change, as many fictions focus on processes of personal transformation of the main characters. Romantic fictions are of special interest in this rega...

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between artistic interventions in the public space and their impact on urban cultural commons. We focus on the case study of the Muri Liberi street art project in NoLo, a semi-peripheral neighbourhood of Milan traditionally characterized by a multi-ethnic, low-income resident population and now witnessing...

We analyze different scenarios of defensive medicine in a unique game theoretic framework, representing a healing relationship between a physician and a patient. The physician should choose between providing the optimal treatment or an inferior one, which can amount to practicing defensive medicine. The patient should choose whether to litigate or...

For decades, from design theory to urban planning and management, from social sciences to urban environmental science, cities have been probed and analyzed from the partial perspective of single disciplines. The digital era, with its unprecedented data availability, is allowing for testing old theories and developing new ones, ultimately challengin...

Background: An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high...

Background: An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high...

The COVID-19 crisis has provided an opportunity to rethink the Veneto Region's economic strategy. This paper examines the links between cultural and creative sectors and the regional manufacturing economy of the Veneto Region in the North of Italy, highlighting the important role that cultural production, and in particular Venice, can play in the r...

In a recent paper by Valensise et al [1], the authors present an analysis of social media data – from Facebook and Twitter – and vaccine hesitancy data – from Facebook – to provide evidence that the overabundance of potentially unreliable information, known as infodemic, does not affect vaccine acceptance. If confirmed, this result could have a dra...

With hindsight, the main weakness behind the ineffective response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in some countries has been the failure to understand, and take account of, the multilayered systemic interdependencies that spread the effects of the pandemic across social, technological, economic and health-care dimensions. For ex...

Background As COVID-19 spreads worldwide, an infodemic – i.e., an over-abundance of information, reliable or not – spreads across the physical and the digital worlds, triggering behavioral responses which cause public health concern. Methods We study 200 million interactions captured from Twitter worldwide during the early stage of the pandemic, f...

This paper examines Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as a unique literary canvas to reformulate the relationship between narratives and planning practices. It does so from the vantage point of the Frame, namely, the dialogues between the Khan (the planner) and Marco Polo (the resident/traveler) punctuating the imaginary cities described in the book...

Within the conceptual framework of the Tightness-Looseness (TL) paradigm, we study the dynamics of the social salience of self-control (tight) vs-self-indulgence (loose) orientations across the 20th century on the basis of the English Google Books corpus, by means of the construction of specific lexica of which we track their relative frequency. We...

BACKGROUND An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. The global scale and high stakes of t...

This special theme issue of Big Data & Society presents leading-edge, interdisciplinary research that focuses on examining how health-related (mis-)information is circulating on social media. In particular, we are focusing on how computational and Big Data approaches can help to provide a better understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 infodemic (over...

Overtourism is an increasingly relevant problem for tourist destinations, and some cities are starting to take extreme measures to counter it. In this paper, we introduce a simple mathematical model that analyzes the dynamics of the populations of residents and tourists when there is a competition for the access to local services and resources, sin...

Musicians have always established a symbiotic relationship with the urban environments in which they live and work, with a tendency to aggregate into place-based relational networks. Bologna provides a clear example of this phenomenon to the point that the evolution of its musical scene can be characterized in terms of its relational dynamics. We s...

The issue of Student Evaluation of Teaching has been explored by a large literature across many decades. However, the role of social influence factors in determining teachers' responses to a given incentive and evaluation framework has been left basically unexplored. This paper makes a first attempt in this vein by considering an evolutionary game-...

Cultural and creative sectors (CCS) are increasingly recognized as a driving economic force. In addition to their undisputed soft power, creative jobs are expected to prove more resilient to automation, and may therefore play an important role in the future growth cycles of advanced global economies. But how is Brexit going to affect the UK’s flour...

During COVID-19, governments and the public are fighting not only a pandemic but also a co-evolving infodemic—the rapid and far-reaching spread of information of questionable quality. We analysed more than 100 million Twitter messages posted worldwide during the early stages of epidemic spread across countries (from 22 January to 10 March 2020) and...

Cultural and creative sectors are important in their own right in terms of their economic footprint and employment. They also spur innovation across the economy, as well as contribute to numerous other channels for positive social impact (well-being and health, education, inclusion, urban regeneration, etc.). They are among the hardest hit by the p...

In this paper, we analyze a K-drama aired by the Korean TV network SBS in 2016, Jealousy Incarnate, as a case study of the application of the Tie-Up Theory to a romantic narrative as a form of simulation of human mating processes with social cognition valence. We find that this case provides us with an example of a mating process where the choice o...

Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting rules affect the way users interact and information spreads. Acknowledging the relation between network connectivity and fun...

Empty cultural places, drastically reduced mobility and tourism blockade as an effect of COVID-19 confinement measures not only generate an evident economic damage to cultural institutions, companies and workers but also create a strong economic and social discomfort at city level. Although many EU member states are now entering into a de-confineme...

The movie industry is typically characterized by high production risk and unpredictable returns. Innovating in this kind of environment is very risky and calls for smart strategies of risk diversification. Hollywood is a recognized content innovation leader in the global movie industry, but the recent tendency for major production companies in the...

UNSTRUCTURED An infodemic is an overabundance of information– some accurate and some not – occurring during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans through digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. A WHO technical cons...

Background: An infodemic is an overabundance of information - some accurate and some not - that occurs during an epidemic. In a similar manner to an epidemic, it spreads between humans via digital and physical information systems. It makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. Objective: A WHO te...

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Many museums and art spaces conduct programming intended to improve health outcomes, but arts professionals’ perceptions of these programs are not well known. This study describes arts professionals’ experiences with museum and art-space interventions intended to improve health. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: A 14-item digital Qualtric...

Online social networks are the perfect test bed to better understand large-scale human behavior in interacting contexts. Although they are broadly used and studied, little is known about how their terms of service and posting rules affect the way users interact and information spreads. Acknowledging the relation between network connectivity and fun...

Our society is built on a complex web of interdependencies whose effects become manifest during extraordinary events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, with shocks in one system propagating to the others to an exceptional extent. We analyzed more than 100 millions Twitter messages posted worldwide in 64 languages during the epidemic emergency due to SA...

We study a simple opinion dynamic model where a number of influencers have the possibility of conditioning it by supporting one of two alternative narratives. Influencers choose the narrative to support in order to optimize their return. They can therefore choose to support a narrative that is socially dysfunctional with which they need not agree w...

Understanding reciprocal relationships between specific arenas in life and at work is critical for designing interventions to improve workplace health and safety. Most studies about the links between dimensions of well-being in life and at work have been cross-sectional and usually narrowly focused on one of the dimensions of the work-life well-bei...

We explored the relationship between cultural and social participation, physical activity, and well-being in a group of residents of the metropolitan area of Naples, Italy and the role that resilience plays in this relationship. Naples offers a remarkable urban environment with the potentially beneficial psychological effects of outstanding natural...

We introduce a typological characterization of possible human heterosexual couples in terms of the concordance-opposition of the orientations of their active and receptive areas as defined by the tie-up theory. We show that human mating incentives, as characterized by widely adopted approaches, such as Becker’s marriage market approach, only captur...

We apply a 2SLS approach to panel data from Italian regions, 2004–2014, to investigate the relationship between cultural and human capital. We find that cultural participation, as a proxy of cultural capital, has positive impact on two proxies of human capital, tertiary education and lifelong learning. Due to structural differences between North Ce...

The issue of Student Evaluation of Teaching has been explored by a large literature across many decades. However, the role of social influence factors in determining teachers' responses to a given incentive and evaluation framework has been left basically unexplored. This paper makes a first attempt in this vein by considering an evolutionary game-...

Cultural venues and facilities, cultural participation and attractiveness have certainly to do with innovation, creativity education and human capital. But how they interact with openness, tolerance and trust quality of governance, local and international connections is very hard to define empirically. In this paper we addressed the issue through a...

We conduct a field experiment involving 143, 9-years old children in their classrooms. Children are requested to flip a coin in private and receive a big or a small prize depending on the outcome they report. Comparing the actual and theoretical distribution of reported wins, we find evidence of cheating at the aggregate level. By using behavioral...

This article examines the implicit space grammar of the cultural vibrancy of the region of Halland in Southwest Sweden. By using a new computational approach, we implement for the first time a methodology that allows us, on the one side, to extrapolate the complex dynamic evolution of the region’s cultural geography and, on the other side, to diagn...