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In this paper we study the impact of news media and public surveys on the electoral campaigns for political competitions. We present an agent-based model that addresses the effective influence of surveys in orienting the opinions of voters before elections. The dynamics of electoral consensus is studied as a function of time by investigating different possible scenarios and the effect of periodic surveys, on the opinions of a small community of voters represented as a network of agents connected by realistic social relationships. Our simulations show the possibility to manage opinion consensus in electoral competitions., Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures

We address the problem of a participatory decision-making process where a shared priority list of alternatives has to be obtained while avoiding inconsistent decisions. An agent-based model (ABM) is proposed to mimic this process in different social networks of stakeholders who interact according to an opinion dynamics model. Simulations' results show the efficacy of interaction in finding a transitive and, above all, shared decision. These findings are in agreement with real participation experiences regarding transport planning decisions and can give useful suggestions on how to plan an effective participation process for sustainable policy-making based on opinion consensus., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, 1 table

We present a graph-theoretic model of consumer choice, where final decisions are shown to be influenced by information and knowledge, in the form of individual awareness, discriminating ability, and perception of market structure. Building upon the distance-based Hotelling's differentiation idea, we describe the behavioral experience of several prototypes of consumers, who walk a hypothetical cognitive path in an attempt to maximize their satisfaction. Our simulations show that even consumers endowed with a small amount of information and knowledge may reach a very high level of utility. On the other hand, complete ignorance negatively affects the whole consumption process. In addition, rather unexpectedly, a random walk on the graph reveals to be a winning strategy, below a minimal threshold of information and knowledge., Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures

The recent 2013 Italian elections are over and the situation that President Napolitano will have to settle soon for the formation of the new government is not the simplest one. After twenty years of bipolarism (more or less effective), where we were accustomed to a tight battle between two great political coalitions, the center-right and center-left, now, in the new Parliament, we have four political formations. But is it really this result, as it would seem to suggest our common sense, the prelude to an inevitable phase of ungovernability? Can a Parliament with changing majorities in Senate to be as efficient as a Parliament with a large majority in both the Houses? In this short note we will try to answer these questions going beyond common sense and analyzing the current political situation by means of a scientific, original and innovative instrument, i.e. an "agent-based simulation". We show that the situation is not so dramatic as it sounds, but it contains within itself potential positive aspects, as long as one makes the most appropriate choices., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

The Brain Drain phenomenon is particularly heterogeneous and is characterized by peculiar specifications. It influences the economic fundamentals of both the country of origin and the host one in terms of human capital accumulation. Here, the brain drain is considered from a microeconomic perspective: more precisely we focus on the individual rational decision to return, referring it to the social capital owned by the worker. The presented model compares utility levels to justify agent migration conduct and to simulate several scenarios within a computational environment. In particular, we developed a simulation framework based on two fundamental individual features, i.e. risk aversion and initial expectation, which characterize the dynamics of different agents according to the evolution of their social contacts. Our main result is that, according to the value of risk aversion and initial expectation, the probability of return migration depends on their ratio, with a certain degree of approximation: when risk aversion is much bigger than the initial expectation, the probability of returns is maximal, while, in the opposite case, the probability for the agents to remain abroad is very high. In between, when the two values are comparable, it does exist a broad intertwined region where it is very difficult to draw any analytical forecast., Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in JASSS

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an "efficiency golden rule" which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, new improved and longer version

The Peter principle has been recently investigated by means of an agent-based simulation and its validity has been numerically corroborated. It has been confirmed that, within certain conditions, it can really influence in a negative way the efficiency of a pyramidal organization adopting meritocratic promotions. It was also found that, in order to bypass these effects, alternative promotion strategies should be adopted, as for example a random selection choice. In this paper, within the same line of research, we study promotion strategies in a more realistic hierarchical and modular organization and we show the robustness of our previous results, extending their validity to a more general context. We discuss also why the adoption of these strategies could be useful for real organizations., Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables; Improved version with new Fig.4,5,6; Accepted for publication on Physica A