Reducing the Cost of Agency: Looking Beyond Top Management Teams

The year 2020 demonstrates that powerful forces exist in the external environment, which may threaten a firm’s survival, but agency problems, within the organization, persist even in years where there are minimal external pressures on the firm. Agency costs can present meaningful challenges to the firm beyond the chief executive and top management team, and the concept of agency is applicable to all employees, not just management. An organizational learning culture is proposed to both aid firms in reducing the cost associated with agency, as well as to enable firms to adapt to rapid changes in the external environment. In this study, the three proposed antecedents of an organizational learning culture are organizational identification, an innovation climate, and team empowerment, and the two measures of collective psychological ownership and organizational citizenship behaviors organizational are proposed as favorable outcomes. When firms look to decrease agency costs, it is important to consider that all firm employees can aggregately influence these costs, and thus, it is important to look beyond top management teams

Finite element thin plate splines in density estimation

The problem of estimating probability density functions differs significantly from functional estimation in which a response variable is present and has for this reason has been dealt with by substantially different methods. We demonstrate here that it is possible to apply spline-type functionals to the problem of density estimation for large data sets. The resulting estimators may be regarded as kernel methods, but may also be applied to inexact or aggregated data. They can be seen to have moments matching the empirical moments of the data up to the degree of smoothness of the function. Finally, we will show that these functions may be naturally approximated by a finite element method and that doing so will make the method scalable

Key issues in rigorous accuracy assessment of land cover products

© 2019 Accuracy assessment and land cover mapping have been inexorably linked throughout the first 50 years of publication of Remote Sensing of Environment. The earliest developers of land-cover maps recognized the importance of evaluating the quality of their maps, and the methods and reporting format of these early accuracy assessments included features that would be familiar to practitioners today. Specifically, practitioners have consistently recognized the importance of obtaining high quality reference data to which the map is compared, the need for sampling to collect these reference data, and the role of an error matrix and accuracy measures derived from the error matrix to summarize the accuracy information. Over the past half century these techniques have undergone refinements to place accuracy assessment on a more scientifically credible footing. We describe the current status of accuracy assessment that has emerged from nearly 50 years of practice and identify opportunities for future advances. The article is organized by the three major components of accuracy assessment, the sampling design, response design, and analysis, focusing on good practice methodology that contributes to a rigorous, informative, and honest assessment. The long history of research and applications underlying the current practice of accuracy assessment has advanced the field to a mature state. However, documentation of accuracy assessment methods needs to be improved to enhance reproducibility and transparency, and improved methods are required to address new challenges created by advanced technology that has expanded the capacity to map land cover extensively in space and intensively in time

Greening the Greyfields New Models for Regenerating the Middle Suburbs of Low-Density Cities

This open access book outlines new concepts, development models, governance and implementation processes capable of addressing the challenges of transformative urban regeneration of cities at precinct scale