Title
Simulating protection rackets: a case study of the Sicilian Mafia.
Abstract
Protection racketeering groups are powerful, deeply entrenched in multiple societies across the globe, and they harm the societies and economies in which they operate in multiple ways. These reasons make their dynamics important to understand and an objective of both scientific and application-oriented interest. Legal and social norm-based approaches arguably play significant roles in influencing protection racket dynamics. We propose an agent-based simulation model, the Palermo Scenario, to enrich our understanding of these influences and to test the effect of different policies on protection racket dynamics. Our model integrates the legal and the social norm-based approaches and uses a complex normative agent architecture that enables the analysis of both agents' behaviours and mental normative representations driving behaviour. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model and the benefits of using this complex normative architecture through a case study of the Sicilian Mafia.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/s10458-016-9330-z
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Protection rackets,Norms,Normative agent architecture,Sicilian Mafia
Globe,Architecture,Normative,Computer science,Harm,Knowledge management,Norm (social),Agent architecture,Racketeering,Artificial intelligence,Racket,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
30
6
1387-2532
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.52
5
Authors
10