Delayer Pays Principle: Examining Congestion Pricing with Compensation

Despite its virtues, congestion pricing has yet to be widely adopted. This paper explores the issues of equity and use of toll revenue and several possible alternatives. The equity and efficiency problems of conventional (uncompensated) congestion pricing are outlined. Then, several alternatives are discussed and developed. A new compensation mechanism is developed, called the delayer pays principle. This principle ensures that those who arecause delay to others pay a toll to compensate those who are delayed. We evaluate the effectiveness of this idea by simulating alternative tolling approaches and evaluating the results across several measures, including delay, social cost, consumer surplus, and equity. Different tolling approaches can satisfy widely varying policy objectives, thus this principle is applicable in diverse situations. Such a system is viable and can eliminate some common hurdles of congestion pricing while remaining revenue neutral.

On the Static Efficiency of Secondary Bond Markets

The major strand of finance literature understands market efficiency through the market’s ability to process information into prices. Another strand of literature refers to the economists’ usual sense of the word, i.e. that markets ensure that resources are allocated to their most profitable expected use, and provide services at the lowest cost. This paper, deploying the second definition, suggests a concept of static efficiency, and claims this can also be seen as a measure of market quality. The paper develops a measure of qualitative static efficiency for bond markets built on four indicators: transparency, number of maturities and issuers, spread, and liquidity. Indicators of market quality should be easily accessible, and permit international and inter-temporal comparison. Using Nordic markets as case studies, we show that these markets became more efficient during the 1990’s, but that transparency of efficiency remains a problem. A number of measurement problems with the static efficiency indicators are discussed, as well as interdependence issues. The paper concludes with comments on future applications of the static efficiency measure.Efficiency; Transparency; Market Liquidity; Bond Markets

Upbeat and quirky with a bit of a build: Interpretive repertories in creative music search

Pre-existing commercial music is widely used to accom-pany moving images in films, TV commercials and com-puter games. This process is known as music synchronisa-tion. Professionals are employed by rights holders and film makers to perform creative music searches on large catalogues to find appropriate pieces of music for syn-chronisation. This paper discusses a Discourse Analysis of thirty interview texts related to the process. Coded ex-amples are presented and discussed. Four interpretive repertoires are identified: the Musical Repertoire, the Soundtrack Repertoire, the Business Repertoire and the Cultural Repertoire. These ways of talking about music are adopted by all of the community regardless of their interest as Music Owner or Music User. Music is shown to have multi-variate and sometimes conflicting meanings within this community which are dynamic and negotiated. This is related to a theoretical feedback model of communication and meaning making which proposes that Owners and Users employ their own and shared ways of talking and thinking about music and its context to determine musical meaning. The value to the music information retrieval community is to inform system design from a user information needs perspective

Organising music for movies

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss the classification of commercial popular music when large digital collections are organised for use in films. Design/methodology/approach - A range of systems are investigated and their organization is discussed, focusing on an analysis of the metadata used by the systems and choices given to the end-user to construct a query. The indexing of the music is compared to a checklist of music facets which has been derived from recent musicological literature on semiotic analysis of popular music. These facets include aspects of communication, cultural and musical expression, codes and competences. Findings -In addition to bibliographic detail, descriptive metadata is used to organise music in these systems. Genre, subject and mood are used widely; some musical facets also appear. The extent to which attempts are being made to reflect these facets in the organization of these systems is discussed. A number of recommendations are made which may help to improve this process. Originality/value - This paper discusses an area of creative music search which has not previously been investigated in any depth and makes recommendations based on findings and the literature which may be used in the development of commercial systems as well as making a contribution to the literature

Content or context? Searching for musical meaning in task-based interactive information retrieval

Creative professionals search for digital music to accompany moving images using interactive information retrieval systems run by music publishers and record companies. This research investigates the creative professionals and the intermediaries communication processes and information seeking and use behaviour with a view to making recommendations to information retrieval systems builders as to the extent of relative importance of content and contextual factors. A communications model is used to suggest that the meaning of music is determined by its listener and use context, as well as cultural codes and competences. The research is framed by a holistic approach based on Ingwersen and Jarvelin’s Interactive Information Seeking, Retrieval and Behavioral processes model

Pilot-aided modulation for narrow-band satellite communications

This paper discusses a number of tone-aided modulation techniques which have been studied as part of the Mobile Satellite Experiment (MSAT-X) Program. In all instances tone(s) are inserted into data-free portions of the transmit spectrum and used by the receiver to sense the amplitude and frequency/phase distortions introduced by the channel. The receiver then uses this information in a feedforward manner to lessen the effect of the distortions on the data detection performance. Particular techniques discussed are the Tone Calibration Technique (TCT), the Dual Tone Calibrated Technique (DTCT), Transparent Tone-In-Band (TTIB), and Dual-Tone Single Sideband (DTSSB)