Luca Verginer

Last Name

Verginer

First Name

Luca

ORCID

0000-0002-2952-6634

Organisational unit

06338 - KOF FB KOF Lab / KOF FB KOF Lab

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Publications 1 - 10 of 33

Stem cell legislation and its impact on the geographic preferences of stem cell researchers
Verginer, Luca; Riccaboni, Massimo (2021)
Eurasian Business Review
Proponents describe stem Cell Replacement Therapy and related technologies to be a significant step forward for medicine. However, due to the inherent ethical problems in human Embryonic Stem Cell Research (hESC), it is strictly regulated around the world. The US has passed at the federal and state level, both supportive and restrictive laws over the years. The changing legislative environment at the state and federal levels has created a situation whereby researchers have to choose whether and where to carry out this research. By exploiting the temporal and spatial heterogeneity and legislative shocks, we assess if the affected scientists have voted with their feet, leaving the state or country imposing restrictive rules and whether hESC research has clustered geographically. We find that most of the hESC research is carried out in supportive states, and significant legislative changes have had a minor but noticeable effect on relocation choices. Most importantly, the research has moved to supportive states. This result suggests that several state-level interventions (supportive), which were opposed to federal laws (restrictive), have counteracted each other. © 2021, The Author(s).
Supply-chain vulnerabilities in critical medicines: A persistent risk to pharmaceutical security
Casiraghi, Giona; Andres, Georges; Schweitzer, Frank; et al. (2025)
Science
Foreword to the Special Issue on Success in Science
Verginer, Luca; Vaccario, Giacomo; Petersen, Alexander M. (2021)
Advances in Complex Systems
The Role of Network Embeddedness on the Selection of Collaboration Partners: an Agent-Based Model with Empirical Validation
Schweitzer, Frank; Garas, Antonios; Tomasello, Mario V.; et al. (2022)
Advances in Complex Systems
We use a data-driven agent-based model to study the core-periphery structure of two collaboration networks, R&D alliances between firms and co-authorship relations between scientists. To characterize the network embeddedness of agents, we introduce a coreness value obtained from a weighted k-core decomposition. We study the change of these coreness values when collaborations with newcomers or established agents are formed. Our agent-based model is able to reproduce the empirical coreness differences of collaboration partners and to explain why we observe a change in partner selection for agents with high network embeddedness.
Tracing Opioids Across the US: A High-Resolution Pharmaceutical Distribution Dataset
Amico, Ambra; Verginer, Luca; Schweitzer, Frank (2024)
Scientific Data
In the field of pharmaceutical supply chains, there is a lack of comprehensive historical data, representing a significant barrier to advancing research. To address this gap, we introduce a high-resolution dataset comprising drug packages distributed to approximately 300,000 pharmacies, hospitals, and practitioners across the US. We reconstruct 375 million distribution paths from ARCOS, a DEA-maintained database comprising half a billion shipping records between 2006 and 2014. While ARCOS tracks dyadic shipments, it does not provide information on the complete journey of single packages from manufacturers to final destinations. Our algorithm is able to reconstruct complete distribution paths from these dyadic records. The reconstructed dataset, with its high temporal and spatial resolution, offers an unprecedented view of US pharmaceutical distribution and is a valuable resource for investigating supply and distribution networks.
Reproducing scientists' mobility: A data-driven model
Vaccario, Giacomo; Verginer, Luca; Schweitzer, Frank (2018)
arXiv
This paper makes two important contributions to understand the mobility patterns of scientists. First, by combining two large-scale data sets covering the publications of 3.5 mio scientists over 60 years, we are able to reveal the geographical 'career paths' of scientists. Each path contains, on the individual level, information about the cities (resolved on real geographical space) and the time (in years) spent there. A statistical analysis gives empirical insights into the geographical distance scientists move for a new affiliation and their age when moving. From the individual career paths, we further reconstruct the world network of movements of scientists, where the nodes represent cities and the links in-and out-flow of scientists between cities. We analyze the topological properties of this network with respect to degree distribution, local clustering coefficients, path lengths and assortativity. The second important contribution is an agent-based model that allows to reproduce the empirical findings, both on the level of scientists and of the network. The model considers that agents have a fitness and consider potential new locations if they allow to increase this fitness. Locations on the other hand rank agents against their fitness and consider them only if they still have a capacity for them. This leads to a matching problem which is solved algorithmically. Using empirical data to calibrate our model and to determine its initial conditions, we are able to validate the model against the measured distributions. This allows to interpret the model assumptions as microbased decision rules that explain the observed mobility patterns of scientists.
The Impact of Acquisitions on Inventors' Turnover in the Biotechnology Industry
Verginer, Luca; Parisi, Federica; van Lidth de Jeude, Jeroen; et al. (2022)
arXiv
In high-tech industries, where intellectual property plays a crucial role, the acquisition of intangible assets and employees’ tacit knowledge is an integral part of the motivation for Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As). Following the molecular biology revolution, the wave of takeovers in the biotechnology industry in the Nineties is a well-known example of M&As to absorb new knowledge. The retention of critical R&D employees embodying valuable knowledge and potential future innovation is uncertain after an acquisition. While not all employees might be relevant for the success of the takeover, inventors are among the most valuable. This is especially true for the acquisition of an innovative start-up. This paper estimates how likely an inventor working for an acquired biotechnology company will leave. We find that inventors affected by acquisitions are 20% more likely to leave the company by a difference-in-differences approach matching both firms and inventors.
A network approach to expertise retrieval based on path similarity and credit allocation
Li, Xiancheng; Verginer, Luca; Riccaboni, Massimo; et al. (2022)
Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination
With the increasing availability of online scholarly databases, publication records can be easily extracted and analysed. Researchers can promptly keep abreast of others' scientific production and, in principle, can select new collaborators and build new research teams. A critical factor one should consider when contemplating new potential collaborations is the possibility of unambiguously defining the expertise of other researchers. While some organisations have established database systems to enable their members to manually produce a profile, maintaining such systems is time-consuming and costly. Therefore, there has been a growing interest in retrieving expertise through automated approaches. Indeed, the identification of researchers' expertise is of great value in many applications, such as identifying qualified experts to supervise new researchers, assigning manuscripts to reviewers, and forming a qualified team. Here, we propose a network-based approach to the construction of authors' expertise profiles. Using the MEDLINE corpus as an example, we show that our method can be applied to a number of widely used data sets and outperforms other methods traditionally used for expertise identification.
When standard network measures fail to rank journals: A theoretical and empirical analysis
Vaccario, Giacomo; Verginer, Luca (2021)
arXiv
Journal rankings are widely used and are often based on citation data in combination with a network perspective. We argue that some of these network-based rankings can produce misleading results. From a theoretical point of view, we show that the standard network modelling approach of citation data at the journal level (i.e., the projection of paper citations onto journals) introduces fictitious relations among journals. To overcome this problem, we propose a citation path perspective, and empirically show that rankings based on the network and the citation path perspective are very different. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we highlight the limitations of standard network metrics, and propose a method to overcome these limitations and compute journal rankings.
Should the Government Reward Cooperation? Insights from an Agent-Based Model of Wealth Redistribution
Schweitzer, Frank; Verginer, Luca; Vaccario, Giacomo (2020)
Advances in Complex Systems
In our multi-agent model, agents generate wealth from repeated interactions for which a prisoner's dilemma payoff matrix is assumed. Their gains are taxed by a government at a rate alpha. The resulting budget is spent to cover administrative costs and to pay a bonus to cooperative agents, which can be identified correctly only with a probability p. Agents decide at each time step to choose either cooperation or defection based on different information. In the local scenario, they compare their potential gains from both strategies. In the global scenario, they compare the gains of the cooperative and defective subpopulations. We derive analytical expressions for the critical bonus needed to make cooperation as attractive as defection. We show that for the local scenario the government can establish only a medium level of cooperation because the critical bonus increases with the level of cooperation. In the global scenario, instead full cooperation can be achieved once the cold-start problem is solved because the critical bonus decreases with the level of cooperation. This allows to lower the tax rate, while maintaining high cooperation.

Publications 1 - 10 of 33

Luca Verginer

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