Questo articolo pone al centro dell’attenzione il fenomeno dell’investimento da remoto in asset finanziari (trading online), ad oggi una delle macro-aree di maggiore successo dell’industria Fintech. ...L’obiettivo principale della ricerca è identificare i fattori di rilevanza sociologica che ne hanno catalizzato la crescita, con un focus particolare sul caso dell’Italia. In primo luogo, dal lato dell’offerta, l’espansione di tale pratica nel paese è stata alimentata dal progressivo consolidamento di un articolato ecosistema di servizi digitali per l’investimento. D’altra parte, anche dinamiche legate alla domanda hanno rivestito un ruolo di primo piano: per meglio comprenderle abbiamo condotto uno studio qualitativo su un campione di 25 investitori amatoriali italiani; la nostra indagine mostra che l’espansione del trading online si deve soprattutto ad una diffusa necessità di far fronte a questioni cruciali per gli individui, come la gestione della carriera personale o il reperimento delle risorse finanziarie necessarie alla riproduzione sociale. Il materiale raccolto evidenzia inoltre che, soprattutto per i soggetti più fragili, il legame tra finanza e sfera personale tende ulteriormente a intensificarsi nei momenti di crisi, e la rapida crescita registrata dal settore in occasione della recente emergenza pandemica rappresenta un chiaro esempio di questa dinamica.
•Solidarity can arise as a byproduct of economic exchanges among peers.•Trust in business can be associated with expectations of social support.•Trust can be generated by economic exchange relations ...among peers.•Successful collaborations do not determine expectations of social support.
This article investigates solidarity arising from economic exchange, by studying a multiplex network of collaboration, trust and social support. After a qualitative pre-study, we performed a full-network survey on a group of independent professionals sharing a coworking space and occasionally collaborating with each other. By running multivariate Exponential Random Graph Models, we showed that successful collaboration might not determine expectations of social support. However, these relationships were related to business-based trust ties, which were predicted by collaboration. Our results suggest that solidarity can emerge as a byproduct of peer economic exchange when trust mediates between professional relationships and expressive ties.
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.
This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian ...sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity .
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.
•We estimated network positions of 2232 author/referee couples in an interdisciplinary journal..•Referees tended to recommend more positively submissions by authors who were closer in their ...collaboration networks.•Co-authorship network positions changed after peer review: respective distances decreased more rapidly than could have been expected by chance.•Findings suggest that peer review could not only reflect but also create and accelerate scientific collaboration patterns.
Peer review is not only a quality screening mechanism for scholarly journals. It also connects authors and referees either directly or indirectly. This means that their positions in the network structure of the community could influence the process, while peer review could in turn influence subsequent networking and collaboration. This paper aims to map these complex network implications by looking at 2232 author/referee couples in an interdisciplinary journal that uses double blind peer review. By reconstructing temporal co-authorship networks, we found that referees tended to recommend more positively submissions by authors who were within three steps in their collaboration network. We also found that co-authorship network positions changed after peer review, with the distances between network neighbours decreasing more rapidly than could have been expected had the changes been random. This suggests that peer review could not only reflect but also create and accelerate scientific collaboration.
This paper looks at 800,000 messages on the Unicredit stock, exchanged by 7,500 investors in the Finanzaonline.com forum, between 2005 and 2012 and measured collective interpretations of stock market ...trends. We examined the correlation patterns between market uncertainty, bad news and investors' network structure by measuring the investors' communication patterns. Our results showed that the investors' network reacted to market trends in different ways: While less turbulent market phases implied less communication, higher market volatility generated more complex communication patterns. While the information content of messages was less technical in situations of uncertainty, bad news caused more informative messages only when market volatility was lower. This meant that bad news had a different impact on network behaviour, depending on market uncertainty. By measuring the investors' expertise, we found that their behaviour could help predict changes in daily stock returns. We also found that expert investors were more influential in communication processes during high volatility market phases, whereas they had less influence on the real-time forum's reaction after bad news. Our findings confirm the crucial role of e-communication platforms. However, they also show the need to reconsider the fragility of these collective intelligence systems when under external shocks.
This paper discusses the work by Pascal Goeke and Evelyn Moser (2018), which provided a remarkable contribution to the study of modern markets. The Authors debated four sociological approaches to ...markets, i.e. interaction, network, institutions and performativity-based arguments, to elaborate a new comprehensive definition of market as tension between noise and order. In this regards, I argue that their theorizing calls for further empirical analysis. Their "over-socialized" perspective should consider both the bounded rationality of real agents and the context-dependency of markets in more detail, given that economic action is shaped by structural, institutional and cultural forms of embeddedness. The paper raises the importance of a more "integrative research", in order to combine the deductive approach provided by Goeke and Moser and inductive research on real markets and real actors.
This paper investigates how reports concerning a given country’s prospects affect investment decisions in two stylized, artificial organizational settings. We designed a role-game laboratory ...experiment, where subjects were asked to make investment decisions for two types of fictitious companies from the same country. We found that when available reports included positive country prospects, subjects strategized more on investments regardless of the characteristics of their organization. When reports included negative prospects, however, certain organizational peculiarities influenced the subjects’ interpretations, with decision-makers opting for more prudent plans when managing a more traditional company. Cognitive maps of decision makers showed that subjects considered investment strategies as a means to fulfil a company’s role expectations regarding appropriate decisions. Notwithstanding all caveats due to the artificial and simplified nature of our experimental setting, our findings indicate the need for more research on the effect of reports and prospect analysis on strategic decisions of companies, especially when business prospects are uncertain.
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