The Authority's role in case of critical hydrogeological phenomena

In any domain, in order to determine what to believe it is necessary to access to different information sources, but also to be able to evaluate their trustworthiness. Are the agents able to identify the more trustworthy sources? Are the agents' performances coherent with the trustworthiness of the sources they are following? Are they able to extract useful information to apply in real cases? Exploiting NetLogo (Wilensky, 1999), we created a platform able to model a variety of situations. For the sake of space, we are not going to report here the whole model, then for further details please look at (Falcone et al, 2016). We used the simulative platform to investigate how different authority's behaviors affect citizens' choice and their trust in information sources (authority, own evaluation, social behavior). We believe citizens are affected by authority's choices not only directly, but also by a social effect. We studied a series of scenarios with different authorities and we analyzed how citizens respond to these changes, measuring their choices and trust values.