Silvano Cincotti

University of Genoa | UNIGE · Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Energetica, Gestionale e dei Trasporti (DIME)

Welcome to the Special Issue on Applications of Complexity for Resilient Organizations, Management, and Innovation Systems. This Special Issue includes six articles highlighting how complexity science and complex systems approaches can be employed to study resilient aspects in organizations, management and innovation systems. Nowadays, governments,...

Electronics waste (e-waste) is the fastest growing category of hazardous solid waste in the world. While the generation of e-waste has recently attracted the attention of a number of researchers, currently, there is little awareness on its management, monitoring and control among the consumers of crowdfunding platforms. This is surprising because t...

Purpose This paper aims at explaining variances in the contribution of Islamic crowdfunding platforms (ICFPs) to sustainable development (SD), by adopting an institutional logic perspective (ILP). ICFPs represent a dual institutional overlap between two logics (the Western-mainstream and the Islamic logic) which have an impact on corporate social r...

Firm performance is an important output that managers should control. Of the several perspectives taken to analyse performance within companies, innovation performance and economic performance are especially relevant. Joint patents are an important but overlooked strategy that firms can use to improve their performance. In this paper, an agent-base...

This study investigates sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) in the agri-food sector, which is one of the most influential industries in a country, through empirical analysis involving patents. Specifically, the causal relationship between SOI outputs and economic performance in the agri-food sector, as well as the moderating role of co-patenti...

We are entering the third decade of the twenty-first century with profound uncertainties and crucial challenges for the world economy. Phenomena like climate change, digital transformation, migration, demographic changes, and the ongoing COVID pandemic need to be understood and promptly addressed. We argue that the agent-based approach in economics...

This article explores the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovation, focusing on medium-sized enterprises and adopting a stakeholder-based view. Using a platform launched by the Italian government, which provides information about CSR efforts and innovation performances at the firm level, the authors distinguish, by...

In Forging a new alliance between economics and engineering, Sergio Mariotti explores the relationship between economics and engineering. The interactions between economics and engineering is a question rather than trivial and Mariotti faces the problem, firstly, from an historical perspective and, secondly, by identifying the paradigms for the eco...

The aim of this paper is to understand how to model industrial symbiosis networks in order to favour its implementation and provide a framework to guide companies and policy makers towards it. Industrial symbiosis is a clear example of complex adaptive systems and traditional approaches (i.e., Input/Output analysis, Material flow analysis) are not...

Digital technologies have been experiencing in the last thirty years a considerable development which has radically changed our economy and lives. In particular, the advent of new intangible technologies, represented by software, artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms, has deeply affected our production systems from manufacturing to s...

The paper, focusing on the context of Public Administration (PA), addresses the effects of monetary incentives in employees’ performance. In the Italian PA, the monetary incentives are distributed according to the D.L.150/09 (i.e., the monetary incentives are divided among the employees according to the employees’ performance) which is based on the...

During the last decades, we have witnessed a strong development of intangible digital technologies. Software, artificial intelligence and algorithms are increasingly affecting both production systems and our lives; economists have started to figure out the long-run complex economic implications of this new technological wave. In this paper, we addr...

The recent history of the European Union (EU) suggests the importance of studying the conditions under which two or more countries can benefit from becoming part of a union. Of course, this depends both on the economic characteristics of the involved countries and on the scope of the union, i.e., the level of integration of markets, regulations, an...

The paper presents an agent-based model of a credit economy which includes a securitisation process and a bailout mechanism for bank bankruptcies. Within this framework, banks are able to sell mortgages to a financial vehicle corporation, which finances its activity by creating mortgage-backed securities and selling them to a mutual fund. In turn,...

During the last decades, we have witnessed a strong development of intangible digital technologies. Software , artificial intelligence and algorithms are increasingly affecting both production systems and our lives; economists have started to figure out the long-run complex economic implications of this new technological wave. In this paper, we add...

A common goal of current research seems to uncover whether crowdfunding (CF) could be considered an effective way to support sustainability‐oriented initiatives in securing funding, due to diverging results emerging from literature. We claim that the objective of proving whether CF may benefit sustainability‐oriented initiatives could be misplaced;...

This paper evaluates the social impact of a football club and its philanthropic organization on the local community and its stakeholders, namely supporters, sponsors, players, and shopkeepers. The methodology used is the Social Return on Investment (SROI). SROI methodology includes all the beneficiaries that are beyond the scope of the company’s ac...

During the last twenty years, we have witnessed the deep development of digital technologies. Artificial intelligence, software and algorithms have started to impact more and more frequently in our daily lives and most people didn't notice it. Recently, economists seem to have perceived that this new technological wave could have some consequences,...

We investigate appropriate banking and regulatory policies aimed at pushing the banking sector to shift from speculative lending, the cause of asset bubbles and economic crises, to green investments lending, so as to foster the transition to a more energy efficient production technology. For this purpose, we consider an enriched version of the Eura...

It is a well-known fact that the housing market, with its associated mortgage securities, plays a crucial role in modern economies. The recent crisis of 2007, triggered by the U.S. real estate bubble, confirms this key role and suggests the importance of regulating mortgage lending. This paper investigates these issues by designing a housing market...

We study the effects of loans and mortgages securitization on business cycles by using a large-scale agent-based stock–flow consistent macroeconomic model and simulator. We enriched the model by including a financial vehicle corporation, which buys loans and mortgages from banks and issues asset-backed securities (ABSs) and mortgage-backed securiti...

Crowdfunding presents many opportunities for moving towards a sustainable society, with specific interest for sustainable entrepreneurs and innovators. In order to examine the potential role of crowdfunding in this context, we position this Special Issue (SI) within the larger stream of sustainability transitions literature, and in particular in re...

In this paper, we investigate the effects on the economy of a feed-in tariff policy mechanism aimed to foster investments in renewable energy production capacity. To this purpose, we employ an enriched version of the agent-based Eurace macroeconomic model, where we have included an energy sector with a fossil-fuel power producer as well as a renewa...

An information-based multiasset artificial stock market characterized by different types of stocks and populated by heterogeneous agents is presented and studied so as to determine the influences of agents’ networks on the market’s structure. Agents are organized in networks that are responsible for the formation of the sentiments of the agents. In...

The paper presents an agent-based model of a credit economy which includes a securitisation process and a bailout mechanism for banks' bankruptcies. Within this framework banks are able to sell mortgages to a financial vehicle corporation, which finances its activity by creating mortgage-backed securities and selling them to a mutual fund. In turn,...

An information-based multi-asset artificial stock market characterized by different types of stocks and populated by heterogeneous agents is presented. In the market, agents trade risky assets in exchange for cash. Beside the amount of cash and of stocks owned, each agent is characterized by sentiments and agents share their sentiments by means of...

A well-interpretable measure of information has been recently proposed based on a partition obtained by intersecting a random sequence with its moving average. The partition yields disjoint sets of the sequence, which are then ranked according to their size to form a probability distribution function and finally fed in the expression of the Shannon...

The 2008 financial crisis, and the subsequent global recession, triggered a wide-spread economic and political debate on the proper policy combination to deal with the crisis and to prevent similar ones in the future. Probably, the main dispute has been around the use of fiscal instruments in order to foster growth while keeping public debt under c...

The global economic and financial crises, whose genesis is often associated with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, had a pervasive impact on all the leading economies in the world. The place where it might have been more disruptive has been the European Union (EU), which revealed a structural fragility and inadequacy to tackle some of the main chall...

The paper deals with the problem of choosing the best O&M strategy for wind power plants. Current maintenance theory considers just production opportunities and minimizes the maintenance costs, but with the liberalization of the electricity market also the electricity price has become an important variable to take into account in the O&M scheduling...

The progressive removal of short-selling constraints in the Chinese stock market provides us with a natural experiment to investigate the relationship between firm-specific return variation (FSRV) and price informativeness. Based on the empirical finding that idiosyncratic volatility is a satisfied proxy for FSRV when the information environment fo...

This chapter addresses the crucial issue of the interplay between credit and business cycles in an economy by means of an enriched version of the agent-based model and simulator Eurace. Eurace is a fully specified agent-based economic model, which includes different types of agents and integrates different types of markets (Cincotti et al., 2010, 2...

We investigate appropriate banking and monetary policies aimed to pressure the banking and financial sector to shift from speculative lending, cause of asset bubbles and economic crises, to green investments lending, in order to foster the transition to a more energy efficient production technology. For this purpose, we consider an enriched Eurace...

To develop more sustainable industrial systems industrialists and policy makers need to better understand how to respond to economic, environmental , and social challenges and transform industrial behavior by leveraging appropriate industrial technology investments to reshaping the current manufacturing value chain. Investments have to be collected...

Finding the optimal weights for a set of financial assets is a difficult task. The mix of real world constrains and the uncertainty derived from the fact that process is based on estimates for parameters that likely to be inaccurate, often result in poor results. This paper suggests that a combination of a filtering mechanism based on random mat...

Evidence increasingly suggests that the industrial system is a large contributor to anthropogenic climate change, is increasingly creating resource scarcity, and is generating unmanageable waste to land-fill. To develop more sustainable industrial systems and sustainable societies, policy makers and industry need to better understand how to transfo...

Real estate bubbles often trigger financial and economic crisis. U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and the Spanish property bubble, both occurring in 2008, are recent examples whose consequences are still affecting the respective economies. The aim of this paper is to understand if the level of concentration of financial capital has an impact on the re...

This paper investigates the housing and mortgage markets by means of an agent-based macroeconomic model of a credit network economy. A set of computational experiments have been carried out in order to explore the effects of different households’ creditworthiness conditions required by banks in order to grant a mortgage. Results show that easier ac...

In European countries, the last decade has been characterized by a deregulation of power production and electricity became a commodity exchanged in proper markets. This resulted in an increasing interest of the scientific community on electricity exchanges for modeling both market activity and price process. This paper analyzes electricity spot-pri...

In a zonal pricing mechanism network congestion arises when the transmission network is not able to serve zones with the necessary electricity which contributes to higher zonal prices. Investing in transmission network infrastructure and establishing a uniform price is considered an efficient solution, especially in Europe. This chapter analyzes th...

Following the events of the credit crunch and the onset of a global recession, alternative ways of modeling modern economies and mechanisms for carrying out policy analysis are now an urgent priority. Traditional mathematical economics is widely viewed to have been compromised through gross simplifications with many assumptions that are now seen to...

At the 100th Dahlem conference New Approaches in Economics after the Financial Crisis a working group devised guidelines for the documentation of computational economic agent-based models, based upon -- but differing from -- the ODD protocol Grimm et al. (2006, 2010). This paper sketches the motivation for coming up with a new set of guidelines tai...

The paper presents the Genoa Artificial Power Exchange, an agent-based framework for modeling and simulating power exchanges implemented in MATLAB. GAPEX allows creation of artificial power exchanges reproducing exact market clearing procedures of the most important European power-exchanges. In this paper we present results from a simulation perfor...

We study tick-by-tick financial returns belonging to the FTSE MIB index of the Italian Stock Exchange (Borsa Italiana). We find that non-stationarities detected in other markets in the past are still there. Moreover, scaling properties reported in the previous literature for other high-frequency financial data are approximately valid as well. Final...

Basel III is a recently-agreed regulatory standard for bank capital adequacy with focus on the macroprudential dimension of banking regulation, i.e., the system-wide implications of banks' lending and risk. An important Basel III provision is to reduce procyclicality of present banking regulation and promote countercyclical capital buffers for bank...

We outline a vision for an ambitious program to understand the economy and financial markets as a complex evolving system of coupled networks of interacting agents. This is a completely different vision from that currently used in most economic models. This view implies new challenges and opportunities for policy and managing economic crises. The d...

This paper describes the vision of a European Exploratory for economics and finance using an interdisciplinary consortium of economists, natural scientists, computer scientists and engineers, who will combine their expertise to address the enormous challenges of the 21st century. This Academic Public facility is intended for economic modelling, inv...

Since the start of the financial crisis in 2007, the debate on the proper level leverage of financial institutions has been flourishing. The paper addresses such crucial issue within the Eurace arti?cial economy, by considering the effects that different choices of capital adequacy ratios for banks have on main economic indicators. The study also g...

A simulation of high-frequency market data is per-formed with the Genoa Artificial Stock Market. Heterogeneous agents trade a risky asset in exchange for cash. Agents have zero intelligence and issue random limit or market orders depending on their budget constraints. The price is cleared by means of a limit order book. A renewal order-generation p...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of economic dynamics. Our contribution, in this paper, is to in...

Traditionally O&M for wind power generation systems aims at reducing the overall maintenance cost and improving the availability of the systems. The increasing importance of energy markets together with the foreseen reduction in incentive schemes for renewable energy require to extend the classic maintenance decision process and to consider also ma...

The paper presents an agent-based framework for modeling and simulating power exchanges, the Genoa Artificial Power Exchange (GAPEX). The framework is implemented in MATLAB using the OOP paradigm, which allows one to define classes using a Java/C++ like syntax. GAPEX allows creation of artificial power exchanges where what-if analysis can be perfor...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of economic dynamics. Our contribution, in this paper, is to in...

The macroeconomic implications of capital requirement for banks have drawn remarkable attention after the financial crisis started in 2007. In particular, a considerable effort has been devoted by the scientific community and by the central banks in order to understand the effects of different capital requirements on long term growth. This paper ai...

In this paper, an information-based multi-assets artificial stock market is presented. The market is populated by heterogeneous agents that are seen as nodes of sparsely connected graphs. The market is characterized by different types of stocks and agents trade risky assets in exchange for cash. Beside the amount of cash and of stocks owned, each a...

In this paper, a multi-assets artificial financial market populated by zero-intelligence traders with finite financial resources is presented. The market is characterized by different types of stocks representing firms operating in different sectors of the economy. Zero-intelligence traders follow a random allocation strategy which is constrained b...

Handling carefully monetary and real flows, given by agents’ behaviors and interactions, is a key requirement when dealing with complex economic models populated by a high number of agents. The paper shows how the stock-flows consistency issue has been faced in the EURACE model, by considering a dynamic balance sheet approach for modeling and valid...

This paper investigates the interplay between monetary aggregates and the dynamics and variability of output and prices by considering both the money supplied by commercial banks as credit to firms and the fiat money created by the central bank through the quantitative easing monetary policy. The authors address this problem by means of an agent-ba...

The paper investigates the relationship between the amount of credit money in the economy and the variability of output and prices in the EURACE model. First we examine if the decision about dividends payment by the firms can affect this variability, then we adopt the policy measure of quantitative easing, that has been largely used by the Fed and...

This paper sheds light on a promising and very active research area for electricity market modeling, that is, agent-based computational economics. The intriguing perspective of such research methodology is to succeed in tackling the complexity of the electricity market structure, thus the fast-growing literature appeared in the last decade on this...

In this paper, an information-based artificial stock market is considered. The market is populated by heterogeneous agents that are seen as nodes of a sparsely connected graph. Agents trade a risky asset in exchange for cash. Besides the amount of cash and assets owned, each agent is characterized by a sentiment. Moreover, agents share their sentim...

This paper studies the Italian wholesale electricity market by means of a realistic agent-based computational model of the day-ahead market session, of the thermal-power production pool and of the Italian high-voltage transmission network. The aim of the paper is twofold. Firstly, it studies how the strategic behavior of the thermal power plants ca...

The observed values of equity premium, i.e., the excess return required by investors to hold equities instead of risk-free securities, are usually far larger than values foreseen by consumption capital asset pricing models with realistic aversion to risk. In order to tackle the problem form a different point of view, we present a model of an artifi...

This paper proposes an agent-based computational model of the Italian wholesale electricity market. In particular, the aim of the paper is to study how the strategic behavior of the thermal power plants can influence the level of price at a zonal and national level with respect of a typical daily load profile. The model reproduces exactly the marke...

Highly oriented polytetrafluoroethylene (HOPTFE) was prepared by friction-transfer method on glass substrates under uniform deposition conditions. The distribution of finely divided HOPTFE macromolecular ridges was investigated by atomic force microscopy, pointing out that HOPTFE molecular films may induce topographically directed self-assembly pro...

We investigate the effect of different voltage waveforms on the growth of titanium oxide nanodots using Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) nanolithography. The resulting oxide features are compared by taking into account the current data detected during oxidation under the application of constant and linear ramp voltages. The experimental analysis of cu...

Tolls are frequently discussed policies to reduce traffic in cities. However, road pricing measures are seldom implemented due to high investments and unpopularity. Transportation planning tools can support planning authorities by solving those problems if they take into account the following aspects: - Demographic attributes like income and time c...

This paper proposes an agent-based computational approach to study physical constrained electricity markets. The computational model consists of repeated day-ahead market sessions and a two-zone transmission network. Different inelastic load serving entities configurations are considered for studying how producers learn to strategically decommit th...