Pier Luigi Sacco

Pier Luigi Sacco
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Pier Luigi verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Pier Luigi verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
University of Chieti-Pescara | UNICH · Department of Neuroscience & Imaging

PhD
Prof of Biobehavioral Economics, Chieti-Pescara University, Research Affiliate metaLAB (at) Harvard

About

275
Publications
125,010
Reads
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4,897
Citations
Introduction
Professor of Biobehavioral Economics, University of Chieti-Pescara; Senior Advisor to Center for Entrepreneurship, OECD Paris; Research Affiliate, metaLAB (at) Harvard. Former Special Adviser to the European Commissioner for Culture & Education, Interim Director AP10, EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity; Research Affiliate, ISPC-CNR Naples; & Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.
Additional affiliations
January 2016 - September 2016
Harvard University
Position
  • Visiting Professor
September 2017 - August 2021
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Position
  • Senior Researcher
March 2020 - present
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Position
  • Consultant
Education
November 1989 - April 1993
European University Institute
Field of study
  • Economics
November 1989 - October 1990
European University Institute
Field of study
  • Economics
October 1983 - July 1988
Bocconi University
Field of study
  • Economics

Publications

Publications (275)
Article
Full-text available
UUlitarian characterizaUons of economic decision-making fail to capture the complex, condiUonal and heterogeneous moUvaUons underlying human behavior as shaped by the predicUve, mulU-criterial drivers of biological regulaUon. Unless economic models start to acknowledge that humans have bodies and a biology with its own adapUve logic and tradeoffs,...
Article
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Attitudes of distrust and paranoia toward scientific and political institutions are increasingly identified as major troubles in online communication and often lumped together under the umbrella term of conspiracy theories. However, this term encompasses two distinct communication practices that deserve to be distinguished. Traditional conspiratori...
Article
Full-text available
In the era of digital music streaming, understanding the monetization and popularity dynamics of online audio distribution platforms is crucial for both researchers and music industry professionals. While much of the existing research has focused on mainstream platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music, we study Bandcamp, an alternative marketplace...
Article
Full-text available
This article explores the intersection between cognition theories and urban planning, conceptualizing the city as a distributed socio-cognitive architecture. It traces the evolution of these theories through three waves—functionalism, social externalism, and radical enactivism —. Correspondingly, the article suggests implications for reorienting ur...
Article
Full-text available
Should fanfiction forums be considered an instance of Digital Heritage Communities? Departing from the mainstream approach according to which Heritage Communities relate to intangible goods or material collections of Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs), we rather focus on the creative and cultural participatory assets enhanced by the advent of di...
Presentation
The contribution illustrates the methodological process for the development of an accessible tool – built on international best practices (UCL Museum Wellbeing Measures Toolkit) and first experimented within 2023 European Photography Festival promoted by Palazzo Magnani - to assess visitors’ self-reported changes in emotional well-being and sense o...
Article
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This paper examines the relationship between societal structures shaped by traditions, norms, laws, and customs, and creative expressions in arts and media through the lens of the predictive coding framework in cognitive science. The article proposes that both dimensions of culture can be viewed as adaptations designed to enhance and train the brai...
Article
Full-text available
The foundation for the EIT-KIC Culture and Creativity was laid in many steps, through a series of EU policy developments. Moving from the seminal report on The Economy of Culture promoted by the acting European Commissioner for Culture Jan Figel in 2006, we have witnessed a gradual development of the idea that cultural and creative sectors are a ma...
Article
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The same individuals can express very different emotions in online social media with respect to face-to-face interactions, partially because of intrinsic limitations of the digital environments and partially because of their algorithmic design, which is optimized to maximize engagement. Such differences become even more pronounced for topics concer...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the importance of interrelationships between cultural and creative industries (CCIs) and tourism for cross-industry innovation and sustainable local development. The purpose of this study is to deepen the understanding of the role and relevance of the CCIs-tourism nexus for innovation-driven so...
Article
Full-text available
Background Mental health problems are prevalent among youth in low-resource countries and are further compounded by stigma and limited access to traditional treatments. The need for scalable, accessible, and stigma-free mental health interventions is urgent. We developed and tested Pre-Texts, an arts-literacy intervention that targets adolescent de...
Presentation
In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the importance of interrelationships between cultural and creative industries (CCIs) and tourism for cross-industry innovation and sustainable local development. The purpose of this study is to deepen the understanding of the role and representation of the CCIs-tourism nexus for innovation-driv...
Article
Since leisure tourism is both a social need as well as a human right, its accessibility is essential for full social integration, especially for people with disabilities who often struggle against exclusion. Accessibility, in the sense considered here, refers to the design of products, amenities, services in a tourism destination that meet the acce...
Article
Full-text available
The significance of meaningful and productive work, and the search for profound meaning within it, is akin to the air we breathe. Its importance is often realized only when it becomes contaminated or depleted. In contemporary societies, there is a growing awareness of the significance of the meaning of work, while simultaneously witnessing mounting...
Book
Full-text available
On 2 February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 infodemic as an overabundance of information – “some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” Indeed, this assessment sheds light on the fact that, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemi...
Article
Full-text available
Culture and creative production have an important but somewhat elusive role in urban development. None of the many conceptual paradigms that have been proposed so far to explain it has turned out entirely satisfactory. We argue that the main reason behind this failure is the implicit linear thinking that informs all these approaches: namely, the id...
Article
Full-text available
People sometimes behave dishonestly to collect undeserved monetary rewards. Prior research has shown that people put more effort into avoiding monetary losses than into making gains, and accordingly they cheat more to avoid losses than to acquire the equivalent amount (loss aversion). However, there has been a lack of research about how reward size...
Article
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In this paper, we perform a text analysis of Adam Smith's two books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, to better characterize their highly disputed differences in terms of moral cognition. In particular, given that Smith's ideas are still very cited and influential in the current scholarly debate on moral cognition, we are i...
Article
A participação cultural mediada digitalmente é muitas vezes considerada mais inclusiva do que a tradicional participação pré-digital. Entretanto, existe uma expectativa superotimista com relação à capacidade das ferramentas e plataformas digitais de ampliar o pool de produção de conteúdo cultural. A mídia digital atual, incluindo as redes sociais m...
Chapter
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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)...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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,...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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,...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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The link between culture and sustainable development has become a major research topic in the past few years. [...]
Article
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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...
Article
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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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Technical Report
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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-...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Technical Report
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Technical Report
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
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...