Undiscouraged by history, the winners of the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for management have applied their methods to try to make sense of the current state of Italian national politics. Their new study is:
“On the efficiency of the new Italian Senate and the role of 5 Star Movement: Comparison among different possible scenarios by means of a virtual Parliament model,” A. Pluchino, A. Rapisarda, C. Garofalo, S. Spagano, M. Caserta, University of Catania, March 18th 2013. The researchers begin their quest with this declaration:
“The recent 2013 Italian elections are over and the situation that President Napolitano will have to settle soon for the formation of the new government is not the simplest one. After twenty years of bipolarism (more or less effective), where we were accustomed to a tight battle between two great political coalitions, the center-right and center-left, now, in the new Parliament, we have four political formations….”
That 2010 Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random. [REFERENCE: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.]