Related papers: Economic Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: A Simulati…
In this paper we present the results of the study of Sicilian Mafia organization by using Social Network Analysis. The study investigates the network structure of a Mafia organization, describing its evolution and highlighting its…
In this article we study the organizational structure of a large group of members of the Sicilian Mafia by means of social network analysis and an econometric analysis of link formation. Our mains results are the following. i) The Mafia…
Inspired by Gambetta's theory on the origins of the mafia in Sicily, we report a geo-concentrating phenomenon of scams in China, and propose a novel economic explanation. Our analysis has some policy implications.
Compared to other types of social networks, criminal networks present hard challenges, due to their strong resilience to disruption, which poses severe hurdles to law-enforcement agencies. Herein, we borrow methods and tools from Social…
It is estimated that Italian Mafias registered 135 billion euros in profits only in 2010. Part of this huge amount of money, coming mostly from the drugs, prostitution and arms illicit markets, is often used to invest into legitimate…
Microscopic models describing a whole of economic interactions in a closed society are considered. The presence of a tax system combined with a redistribution process is taken into account, as well as the occurrence of tax evasion. In…
Urban outputs often scale superlinearly with city population. A difficulty in understanding the mechanism of this phenomenon is that different outputs differ considerably in their scaling behaviors. Here, we formulate a physics-based model…
Crime is pervasive into modern societies, although with different levels of diffusion across regions. Its dynamics are dependent on various socio-economic factors that make the overall picture particularly complex. While several theories…
Nowadays, 23% of the world population lives in multi-million cities. In these metropolises, criminal activity is much higher and violent than in either small cities or rural areas. Thus, understanding what factors influence urban crime in…
Crime remains one of the significant problems that countries are grappling with globally. With shrinking economies and increasing poverty, crime has been on the rise in many countries. In this paper, we propose a system of non-linear…
Containing the spreading of crime is a major challenge for society. Yet, since thousands of years, no effective strategy has been found to overcome crime. To the contrary, empirical evidence shows that crime is recurrent, a fact that is not…
Containing the spreading of crime in urban societies remains a major challenge. Empirical evidence suggests that, left unchecked, crimes may be recurrent and proliferate. On the other hand, eradicating a culture of crime may be difficult,…
In this paper, we study a game called ``Mafia,'' in which different players have different types of information, communication and functionality. The players communicate and function in a way that resembles some real-life situations. We…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
This paper presents a simple agent-based model of an economic system, populated by agents playing different games according to their different view about social cohesion and tax payment. After a first set of simulations, correctly…
Tax evasion, usually the largest component of an informal economy, is a persistent challenge over history with significant socio-economic implications. Many socio-economic studies investigate its dynamics, including influencing factors, the…
The economics of an internet crime has newly developed into a field of controlling black money. This economic approach not only provides estimated technique of analyzing internet crimes but also gives details to analyzers of system…
Crime is an economically important activity, sometimes called the industry of crime. It may represent a mechanism of wealth distribution but also a social and economic charge because of the cost of the law enforcement system. Sometimes it…
The yearly aggregated tax income data of all, more than 8000, Italian municipalities are analyzed for a period of five years, from 2007 to 2011, to search for conformity or not with Benford's law, a counter-intuitive phenomenon observed in…
Unveiling the relationships between crime and socioeconomic factors is crucial for modeling and preventing these illegal activities. Recently, a significant advance has been made in understanding the influence of urban metrics on the levels…