Networks in the shadow of markets and hierarchies : calling the shots in the visual effects industry

The nature and organisation of creative industries and the creative economy has received increased attention in recent academic and policy literatures (Florida 2002; Grabher 2002; Scott 2006a). Constituted as one variant on new economy narratives, creativity, alongside knowledge, has been presented as a key competitive asset, Such industries – ranging from advertising, to film and new media – are seen as not merely expanding their scale and scope, but as leading edge proponents of a more general trend towards new forms of organization and economic coordination (Davis and Scase 2000). The idea of network forms (and the consequent displacement of markets and hierarchies) has been at the heart of attempts to differentiate the field economically and spatially. Across both the discussion of production models and work/employment relations is the assertion of the enhanced importance of trust and non-market relations in coordinating structures and practices. This reflects an influential view in sociological, management, geography and other literatures that social life is ‘intrinsically networked’ (Sunley 2008: 12) and that we can confidently use the term ‘network society’ to describe contemporary structures and practices (Castells 1996). Our paper is sceptical of the conceptual and empirical foundations of such arguments. We draw on a number of theoretical resources, including institutional theory, global value chain analysis and labour process theory (see Smith and McKinlay 2009) to explore how a more realistic and grounded analysis of the nature of and limits to networks can be articulated. Given space constraints, we cannot address all the dimensions of network arguments or evidence. Our focus is on inter and intra-firm relations and draws on research into a particular creative industry – visual effects – that is a relatively new though increasingly important global production network. Through this examination a different model of the creative industries and creative work emerges – one in which market rules and patterns of hierarchical interaction structure the behaviour of economic actors and remain a central focus of analysis. The next section outlines and unpacks in more detail arguments concerning the role and significance of networks, markets and hierarchies in production models and work organisation in creative industries and the ‘creative economy’.

Towards an automatic road lane marks extraction based on ISODATA segmentation and shadow detection from large-scale aerial images

The automatic extraction of road features from remote sensed images has been a topic of great interest within the photogrammetric and remote sensing communities for over 3 decades. Although various techniques have been reported in the literature, it is still challenging to efficiently extract the road details with the increasing of image resolution as well as the requirement for accurate and up-to-date road data. In this paper, we will focus on the automatic detection of road lane markings, which are crucial for many applications, including lane level navigation and lane departure warning. The approach consists of four steps: i) data preprocessing, ii) image segmentation and road surface detection, iii) road lane marking extraction based on the generated road surface, and iv) testing and system evaluation. The proposed approach utilized the unsupervised ISODATA image segmentation algorithm, which segments the image into vegetation regions, and road surface based only on the Cb component of YCbCr color space. A shadow detection method based on YCbCr color space is also employed to detect and recover the shadows from the road surface casted by the vehicles and trees. Finally, the lane marking features are detected from the road surface using the histogram clustering. The experiments of applying the proposed method to the aerial imagery dataset of Gympie, Queensland demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.

Cities in the airports 'shadow' : underlying interests and discretionary power in airport-region development

The previously distinct boundary between airports and their cities has become increasingly blurred as new interests and actors are identified as important stakeholders in the decision making process. As a consequence airport entities are more than ever seeking an integrated existence with their surrounding regions. While current planning strategies provide insights on how to improve and leverage land use planning in and around airports, emerging challenges for implementing and protecting these planning ideals stem from the governance shadows of development decisions. The thesis of this paper is that improving the identification, articulation and consideration of city and airport interests in the development approval process (between planning and implementation) can help avoid outcomes that hinder the ability of cities and their airports to meet their separate/mutual long-term objectives. By applying a network governance perspective to the pilot case study of Brisbane, analysis of overlapping and competing actor interests show how different governance arrangements facilitate (or impede) decision making that protects sustainable ‘airport region’ development. ---------- Contributions are made to airport and city development decision makers through the identification and analysis of effective and ineffective decision making pathways, and to governance literature by way of forwarding empirically derived frameworks for showing how actors protect their interests in the ‘crowded decision making domain’ of airport region development. This work was carried out through the Airport Metropolis Research Project under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding scheme (LP0775225).

The impact of tax morale and institutional quality on the shadow economy

This paper uses a multivariate analysis to examine how countries‘ tax morale and institutional quality affect the shadow economy. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors in understanding the level of and changes in the shadow economy. Newly available data sources offer the unique opportunity to further illuminate a topic that has received increased attention. After controlling for a variety of potential factors, we find strong support that a higher tax morale and a higher institutional quality lead to a smaller shadow economy.

Local autonomy, tax morale, and the shadow economy

Policymakers often propose strict enforcement strategies to fight the shadow economy and to increase tax morale. However, there is an alternative bottom-up approach that decentralises political power to those who are close to the problems. This paper analyses the relationship with local autonomy. We use data on tax morale at the individual level and macro data on the size of the shadow economy to analyse the relevance of local autonomy and compliance in Switzerland. The findings suggest that there is a positive (negative) relationship between local autonomy and tax morale (size of the shadow economy).

Effects of transportation accessibility on residential property values: Application of spatial hedonic price model in Seoul, South Korea, metropolitan area

A number of studies have focused on estimating the effects of accessibility on housing values by using the hedonic price model. In the majority of studies, estimation results have revealed that housing values increase as accessibility improves, although the magnitude of estimates has varied across studies. Adequately estimating the relationship between transportation accessibility and housing values is challenging for at least two reasons. First, the monocentric city assumption applied in location theory is no longer valid for many large or growing cities. Second, rather than being randomly distributed in space, housing values are clustered in space—often exhibiting spatial dependence. Recognizing these challenges, a study was undertaken to develop a spatial lag hedonic price model in the Seoul, South Korea, metropolitan region, which includes a measure of local accessibility as well as systemwide accessibility, in addition to other model covariates. Although the accessibility measures can be improved, the modeling results suggest that the spatial interactions of apartment sales prices occur across and within traffic analysis zones, and the sales prices for apartment communities are devalued as accessibility deteriorates. Consistent with findings in other cities, this study revealed that the distance to the central business district is still a significant determinant of sales price.

Application of reinforcement learning in an open railway access market price negotiation

In an open railway access market price negotiation, it is feasible to achieve higher cost recovery by applying the principles of price discrimination. The price negotiation can be modeled as an optimization problem of revenue intake. In this paper, we present the pricing negotiation based on reinforcement learning model. A negotiated-price setting technique based on agent learning is introduced, and the feasible applications of the proposed method for open railway access market simulation are discussed.

Unbiased estimation of the half-life to price index convergence among U.S. cities

Estimates of the half-life to convergence of prices across a panel of cities are subject to bias from three potential sources: inappropriate cross-sectional aggregation of heterogeneous coefficients, presence of lagged dependent variables in a model with individual fixed effects, and time aggregation of commodity prices. This paper finds no evidence of heterogeneity bias in annual CPI data for 17 U.S. cities from 1918 to 2006, but correcting for the “Nickell bias” and time aggregation bias produces a half-life of 7.5 years, shorter than estimates from previous studies.