Legality within companies and companies within legality. Searching for new horizons from utopia to eutopia: the contribution of artificial intelligence

The research is aimed at investigating the relationship between legality and companies under a double perspective. On the one hand, the study evaluates how the concept of legality can be applied within business activity (legality within companies). On the other hand, the analysis focuses on how business conduct is proactively run towards legality (companies within legality). The most innovative contribution to the research is represented by the employment of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodology: decision trees (DT). DTs allow to automatically identify a combination of variables from a given dataset in order to explain the target variables according to a different perspective, completely new and not considered by a financial model already theorized by the financial literature on the topic. This thesis consists of a collection of individual papers, accepted for publishing or already published in recognized scientific journals. The first chapter presents the paper ““Legality rating” and “company rating” in support of culture of legality. A conceptual framework”, which provides a conceptual framework of culture of legality as well as the contribution of “legality rating” (rating di legalità) and “company rating” (rating d’impresa) at this purpose. Within the comprehensive framework of this thesis, in this chapter, legality within companies and companies within legality appear to pertain to utopia, that is a “no-place”, since the relationship between legality and companies is explained at theoretical level. Then, the second chapter introduces the paper “Legality rating and credit. A focus on companies in Southern Italy”, which analyzes the issue of legality and credit within the Italian business context, providing a focus on the Southern Italy. In relation to the overall structure of this dissertation, this chapter tries to outline how utopia is slowly replaced by eutopia, as long as some practical implications on legality within companies and companies within legality are caught up. Lastly, the third chapter proposes the paper “Company’s distress and legality under the magnifying glass of artificial intelligence: the contribution of decision trees to identify best practices”, which examines whether and how AI may facilitate the joint comprehension of corporate distress and corporate legality. Regarding the research as a whole, this chapter shows the application of an AI methodology to explore legality within companies and companies within legality that declares the transition from utopia to eutopia. In conclusion, the research path has been twisted and turned through the three chapters in order to illustrate, with crescendo intensity, the possible passage from utopia to eutopia. AI methodology, applied for the first time to a dataset composed by Italian companies in possession of legality rating in order to jointly understand company’s distress and legality, shows the existence of a “good place” in which the theorization of these concepts is entirely reflected in reality.