Emergence, survival, and segregation of competing gangs.

In this paper, we approach the phenomenon of criminal activity from an infectious perspective by using tailored compartmental agent-based models that include the social flavor of the mechanisms governing the evolution of crime in society. Specifically, we focus on addressing how the existence of competing gangs shapes the penetration of crime. The mean-field analysis of the model proves that the introduction of dynamical rules favoring the simultaneous survival of both gangs reduces the overall number of criminals across the population as a result of the competition between them.

Fear induced explosive transitions in the dynamics of corruption.

In this article, we analyze a compartmental model aimed at mimicking the role of imitation and delation of corruption in social systems. In particular, the model relies on a compartmental dynamics in which individuals can transit between three states: honesty, corruption, and ostracism. We model the transitions from honesty to corruption and from corruption to ostracism as pairwise interactions.

Analyzing the potential impact of BREXIT on the European research collaboration network.

In this work, we study the impact that the withdrawal of institutions from the United Kingdom caused by BREXIT has on the European research collaboration networks. To this aim, we consider BREXIT as a targeted attack to those graphs composed by the European institutions that have collaborated in research projects belonging to the three main H2020 programs (Excellent Science, Industrial Leadership, and Societal Challenges). The consequences of this attack are analyzed at the global, mesoscopic, and local scales and compared with the changes suffered by the same collaboration networks when a similar quantity of nodes is randomly removed from the network.

Norm violation versus punishment risk in a social model of corruption.

We analyze the onset of social-norm-violating behaviors when social punishment is present. To this aim, a compartmental model is introduced to illustrate the flows among the three possible states: honest, corrupt, and ostracism. With this simple model we attempt to capture some essential ingredients such as the contagion of corrupt behaviors to honest agents, the delation of corrupt individuals by honest ones, and the warning to wrongdoers (fear like that triggers the conversion of corrupt people into honesty).

[The results of the operation of a monitoring unit for home oxygen therapy].

Objective: This study aims to a) analyze the prevalence of domiciliary oxygen therapy (DOT) in Mallorca, b) evaluate the cost effectiveness of the DOT monitoring unit, and c) determine the survival of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who are presently receiving DOT.

Method: When the DOT unit was created in April 1994, the situation of all patients receiving DOT in Mallorca was assessed in a transversal study. Over the next three years, these patients were reassessed regularly and all new prescriptions were evaluated (longitudinal study).