0000000000371408
AUTHOR
Rosaria Conte
Calibration and Validation
The aim of this chapter is to summarise the problems incurred during the phases of calibrating and validating the extortion racket models used by the GLODERS project. The chapter starts with the discussion of the data availability and summarises shortly the contents of Sect. 4.3. It continues with a discussion of what parameterisation, calibration, sensitivity analysis and validation have to do with each other and ends up with a discussion of the validity of the GLODERS models.
A Proposal for Agent Simulation of Peer Review
Peer review lies at the core of current scientific research. It is composed of a set of social norms, practices and processes that connect the abstract scientific method with the society of people that apply the method. As a social construct, peer review should be understood by building theory-informed models and comparing them with data collection. Both these activities are evolving in the era of automated computation and communication: new modeling tools and large bodies of data become available to the interested researcher. In this paper, starting from abstract principles, we develop and present a model of the peer review process. We also propose a working implementation of a subset of t…
An Agent-Based Model of Extortion Racketeering
Mafias can be considered as criminal organisations that are in the business of producing, promoting, and selling protection. Here, we describe the Palermo Scenario, an agent-based model of protection rackets aimed to deepen our understanding of protection rackets, and help policymakers to evaluate methods for destabilising them. Additionally, since the system is explicitly specified, we can use it to investigate the entire causal pathway from cause to effect: not only from actions to Mafia destabilisation, but also the intermediate actions along the path and actors' internal mental representations among the population.