PRIN 2017

Head: Bernardo Giorgio Mattarella

The project examines administrative reforms with an interdisciplinary approach (with the participation of lawyers, political scientists, sociologists and economists) and from different perspectives: that of reform policies, that of implementation, that of comparison and connections with foreign and international experiences, and that of local government. One research unit will specifically engage on each of these perspectives. The research units will cooperate intensively through frequent meetings and the exchange of data and documents. This methodology is aimed at remedying frequent defects in public administration studies and particularly in those on administrative reforms, characterized by episodicity, monodisciplinarity, theoretical nature, emphasis on legal provisions, lack of supranational and comparative perspective, descriptive rather than proactive tendency, focus mainly on the national administration. The research aims are primarily scientific in nature, but the research group members aim to make a contribution to improving reform policies and implementing ongoing reforms.

Head: Giuseppe Francesco Italiano

Networks are ubiquitous in several domains. In many of today's applications, such as social networks, they are huge in size, with more than billions of nodes/edges. The ambitious goal of project AHeAD is to produce new powerful algorithmic tools to handle massive network analytics, thus providing scientific groundwork and technological advances for processing and visualizing massive, streamed and dynamic networked data. AHeAD will investigate novel algorithmic and visualization techniques and will apply the new findings especially to the domain of social networks. Achieving this goal requires a quantum leap in designing and engineering algorithms: the sheer size of the data and their networked and evolving nature pose new algorithmic challenges, which cannot be addressed by traditional methods. AHeAD is proposed by a highly qualified and integrated consortium of 6 research units, which are internationally recognized as leading groups in algorithmic research and have strong research ties and a long history of successful cooperation: Padova, Perugia, Pisa, Roma Sapienza, Roma Tor Vergata, and Roma Tre. Their high scientific profile is witnessed by their publication records and by their presence in boards of prestigious journals and conferences.

Head: Marco Scarsini

Digital markets form an increasingly important component of the global economy. The Internet has enabled new markets with previously unknown features (e-commerce, web-based advertisement, viral marketing, sharing economy, real-time trading), and algorithms play a central role in many decision processes involved in these markets. For example, algorithms run electronic auctions, adjust prices dynamically, trade stocks, harvest big data to decide market strategies and to provide recommendations to customers The focus of the project is on the development of new methods and tools in research areas that are critical to the understanding of digital markets: algorithmic game theory, market and mechanism design, machine learning, algorithmic data analysis, optimization in strategic settings. These methods will be applied to solve fundamental algorithmic problems motivated by Internet advertisement, sharing economy, mechanism design for social good, security games. While the research is focused on foundational work - with rigorous design and analysis of algorithms, mechanisms and games - it will also include empirical validation on large-scale datasets from real-world applications.

Head: Giuseppe Melis

In line with H2020 for a smart, sustainable and inclusive growth (focus ICT-13 and 26), the research intends to verify whether and how AI linked to algorithmic decisions and predictions based on data impacts on qualifying aspects of national legal theory and practice. The research, mainly legal, aims to identify appropriate tools for the protection of rights and the distribution of wealth by taking as strength the contribution of sociologists, economists and statisticians. There are three objectives: 1) to verify (A) if and how the application of AI questions some traditional legal categories of civil law (i.e. subjectivity and liability) and (B) the forms of repercussion it has, in particular on tax law, business law and labour law; 2) Case Studies: to test the results of the general reflections on two markets that are particularly significant in the application of AI: finance and labour (specifically considered by H2020 as cross-cutting activities for ICT); 3) to propose a reference framework useful to guide both the legislator (national and supranational) in their choices of policies and regulation of the phenomenon, and the private operators by providing them with a reference model for legal compliance.

Head: Gianfranco Pellegrino

The worry about the production and dissemination of misinformation and fake data is widespread in democratic societies, so much that a number of problematic political events and processes are seen as the consequences of citizens’ resulting distorted beliefs. From Brexit to Trump’s election in the US, from the rejection of refugees to the objection to vaccines across Europe: all these are taken as instances of the effect of distorted information on citizens’ behavior and attitudes. The project aims to offer the first complete typology and philosophical analysis of the many cognitive failures, hastily grouped under the label “fake news” and a regulatory assessment of the different institutional responses that have been developed to address them. Accordingly, this project aims at: 1) a critical analysis of the cognitive traps affecting democratic life; 2) a careful normative assessment of the proposed suggestions to address the issue, questioning their potential risk of undermining democratic principles and values as much as the cognitive distortions which the suggestions are supposed to mend; 3) a normative consideration of cognitive failures and of possible remedial cognitive virtues from the viewpoint of democratic ethics.

Head: Fabiano Schivardi

The rise of the "knowledge economy", broadly defined as a production system in which knowledge and information are the key assets for firms' and workers' success, has generated a growing interest in the mechanisms of generation and transmission of knowledge and information within and across firms and workers, and in their economic effects. This growing academic and policy debate has spawned new theoretical research and prompted the analysis of new data sources that allow to trace information flows across firms and workers. The project studies how the process of information generation, transmission and revelation affects firms' performance and workers' careers. A first set of papers will consider how this process is shaped by the structure of connections between firms, between firms and banks, and between firms and politicians. The second part of the project focuses on workers' careers: it will consider how imperfect information about workers' skills affect talent allocation and therefore careers in skill intensive jobs. Finally, the research will study how social interactions and information transmission, both during the "coming-of-age" period and on the workplace, can shape workers' careers, focusing in particular on how and to what extent such interactions can contribute to explain the gender gap in compensation.

Head: Giovanni Piccirilli

The project elaborates the perspective of interlegality to address the problems due to the overlap between different legalities by simultaneously controlling the same problems. Doctrines of the systemic separation among State law, transnational/international law (e.g. WTO), regional law (e.g. EU) prove to be untenable, unfit to cope with conflicts and to provide guidance in practical issues. Given the material interconnections among subject-matters (e.g. security- access to justice, trade- human rights) interlegality is both the name for this state of affairs and for its explanatory theory. This interdisciplinary research studies its impact in exemplary fields (from security to environment, food safety, immigration, human rights, trade) through constitutional, administrative and international law, as well as taking the vantage point of decision-making authorities, including national regional or international courts.

Head: Cristina Fasone

The project’s proposal is the delivery of an updated research of the constitutional changes envisaged by the separatist claims that are deeply influencing the balance of the statehood in some European unitary states where working forms of multilevel government are currently fulfilled. The main inquiry is intended to focus on the countries (UK, Spain, Belgium, Italy) where a democratic governance pays to common constitutional principles, and where the nationalist or regional movements' quest for self-determination, usually enacted through referendums and polls, gains a huge popular support. The survey will extend to the countries in Eastern Europe where the ghost of separatism is a factor of the constitutional disestablishment of freshly established democracies and of marginalization of ethnic minorities. Another branch of the project will face the astonishing effects of the Brexit as a starting point of a somehow "macro-separatist" commitment whose consequences are likely to affect deeply the metamorphosis of the statehood outward (the EU) and inward (sub-statal constituent parts). The focus on the Brexit case will help to survey how far the rise of successful separatist campaigns are likely to drive the civil society's choice toward euro skeptic or pro-Europe orientations.

Head: Fausto Gozzi

The main objective of this interdisciplinary project (Mathematics and Economics), is to investigate, using innovative applied mathematical and economic methods, the causes and consequences of the observed temporal-spatial evolution of economic activities. To reach this goal first the study will develop and analyse mathematical models to describe the time evolution of most important economic variables (e.g. labour and capital) across different locations, taking into account space heterogeneity. The framework will allow to circumvent several drawbacks present in the literature typically due to the lack of a comprehensive approach to spatial inequalities. The models will be mainly infinite dimensional optimal control problems. The theoretical analysis will have an impact on the mathematical theory in this field. Second, such models will be employed to conduct quantitative empirical analysis on how economic activities spread across locations, their evolution, and the implications in terms of both inequalities and aggregate efficiency. The empirical analysis will help policymakers to reach a better understanding of the roots of the actual spatial agglomeration and inequality. It will also provide elements for improving policies targeted to reducing disparities in economic development. The issues tackled in the project are at the frontier of contemporary research. The research exhibits a clear interdisciplinary character, in particular for the interactions between the mathematical and economic approaches to the issues under investigation. The planned output consists in scientific publications and software, and planned activities include talks, meetings, workshops, scientific training for the younger participants to the project. This should guarantee a wide diffusion of the outcomes of the project as well as increase its impact on interested stakeholders.