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This article focuses on remote investment in financial assets (online trading), to date one of the most successful macro-areas of the Fintech industry. The main objective of the research is to identify the factors of sociological relevance that catalysed its growth, with a particular focus on the case of Italy. Firstly, on the supply side, the expansion of this practice in the country has been fuelled by the progressive consolidation of an articulated ecosystem of digital investment services. On the other hand, demand-side dynamics have also played a major role: to better understand them, we conducted a qualitative study on a sample of 25 Italian amateur investors. Our research shows that the expansion of online trading is amplified by a widespread need to cope with crucial issues for individuals, such as managing personal careers or finding the financial resources needed for social reproduction. The material collected also shows that, especially for the most fragile individuals, the link between finance and the personal sphere tends to intensify in times of crisis, and the rapid growth recorded by the sector during the recent pandemic emergency is a clear example of this dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an empirical research on the financialization processes of manufacturing companies in Italy. We focused on the district of Brescia, one of the strategic industrial areas at national level: by considering the entire population of joint-stock companies operating in the sector (currently about 6,000), we studied the diffusion of finance-oriented management logics between 2010 and 2018. We then measured the degree of penetration of financial shareholders within the companies of the district. Furthermore, we analyzed the intertemporal relationship between ownership structures and financialization processes. To this end, we estimated a series of longitudinal models, which allowed us to investigate the tendency of companies to (i) reduce the number of employees, (ii) increase short-term financial assets and (iii) increase the incidence of financial income with respect to sales. The results show that financial logics are gradually advancing, even in a context in which family ownership and medium-small company dimension have always prevailed. Our study highlights the importance of analyzing not only regulatory and macro-institutional frameworks, but especially the organizational fields, since financialization processes are often triggered by relationships between companies and surrounding actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illegal markets are characterised by the absence of public institutions and formal contracts. Under such uncertain circumstances, what type of factors facilitate cooperation between illegal market actors? This question has been examined empirically with regard to a specific and under-researched illegal organisation type: human smuggling networks. These criminal enterprises differ from traditional Mafia-type syndicates, in that they are not necessarily bound by family or kinship ties, where violence is not generally used to intimidate and no territorial control or code of conduct is enforced by the criminal organisation. The authors hypothesise that elements such as cultural similarities, social control, and criminal experience are important facilitating factors associated with cooperation between members of human smuggling enterprises. The latter has been tested by applying a social network analysis to investigate a large-scale human smuggling organisation which was operative in the North of Italy. While the results do not support social control to be a considerable factor in facilitating cooperative behaviour between smugglers, cultural similarities and criminal experience have a significant effect and thus should be carefully considered with regard to the ineffectiveness of current counter-smuggling measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines information-search heuristics and communication patterns in an online forum of investors during a period of market uncertainty. Global connections, real-time communication, and technological sophistication have created an unpredictable market environment. As such, investors try to deal with semantic, strategic, and operational uncertainty by following heuristics that reduce information redundancy. In this study, we have tried to find traces of cognitive communication heuristics in a large-scale data set including 8 years of online posts (2004–2012) for a forum of Italian investors. We identified various market volatility conditions on a daily basis to understand the influence of market uncertainty on cognitive and communication processes. We found that investors communicated more dynamically when the market was unstable, while they were more prone to anchor heuristic when market uncertainty was invariant. Furthermore, abnormal market trends triggered more availability-based communication patterns. We also found that expertise matters. This would suggest that online communities need intelligent, context-specific tools to support partner selection and stimulate nonredundant communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at 10 years of reviews in a multidisciplinary journal, The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS), which is the flagship journal of social simulation. We measured referee behavior and referees' agreement. We found that the disciplinary background and the academic status of the referee have an influence on the report time, the type of recommendation and the acceptance of the reviewing task. Referees from the humanities tend to be more generous in their recommendations than other referees, especially economists and environmental scientists. Second, we found that senior researchers are harsher in their judgments than junior researchers, and the latter accept requests to review more often and are faster in reporting. Finally, we found that articles that had been refereed and recommended for publication by a multidisciplinary set of referees were subsequently more likely to receive citations than those that had been reviewed by referees from the same discipline. Our results show that common standards of evaluation can be established even in multidisciplinary communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]