Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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i rms, where each cell value indicates the coincidence (e.g. association membership) or
(dis)similarity (e.g. dif erence in i rm age) of two i rms on an item.
The second part asked i rms to identify all sales partnerships with other agencies. The
variable is represented in a binary adjacency matrix, where for each pair of agencies the
value 1 indicates the existence of an alliance and 0 indicates its absence. Thus, the
depend-
ent variable
is the network of sales alliances for trading rights-managed picture licences
between picture agencies in Germany. Each relationship was further specii ed according
to three characteristics: i rst, two types of licence model - rights-managed vs. royalty-
free - were distinguished. Since the alliance behaviour in royalty-free imagery is quite
dif erent from cooperation in rights-managed photography, the study focused purely on
the dominant business of rights-managed sales alliances. Second, the year of establish-
ment of each licence agreement was assessed in order to produce network stages on a
year-to-year basis. This temporal dimension of network formation builds the basis for
the analysis of network dynamics over time and allows for testing the ef ects of homoph-
ily, geographical propinquity, popularity bias and multiconnectivity on later stages of
network structure. Third, the direction of picture supply distinguishes between senders
and receivers and thus identii es reciprocal and unidirectional linkages.
Finally, four other variables were generated from the alliance data. The dyadic dif-
ferences between individual i rms' in-degree and out-degree centralities were used to
measure the concept of popularity bias. The greater the dif erences in in-degree (receiv-
ing relations) or out-degree (sending relations) centrality between a pair of agencies, the
more likely should they be to have a relationship in the future. The concept of multicon-
nectivity was measured by two variables. The point connectivity of two unconnected
(non- allying) i rms is the number of i rms that need to be deleted so that no indirect con-
nection exists between them any more (Borgatti et al., 2002). Geodesic count produces a
measure that counts the number of shortest network paths between each pair of agencies
(Borgatti et al., 2002).
Survey population
There are three organizational types of picture agency. In the dominant case the agency
is a commercial representative of the images provided by independent photographers.
The photographer holds the intellectual property rights and commissions the agency to
sell reproduction licences for a royalty. Apart from this dominant form, there are pho-
tographer cooperatives and archives. In contrast to agencies, the former maintain the
intellectual property rights within the cooperative and the latter can market historical
public domain images, where intellectual property rights have expired. Therefore co-
operatives and archives may of er pictures at more competitive prices since they do not
have to share their revenues with the legal originator. The population of picture agencies
is dei ned as the number of commercial i rms that license usage rights of still images under
commission of independent photographers. This explicitly excludes non-commercial ar-
chives, small-scale sideline businesses and direct-marketing activities of photographers.
Photographer cooperatives, however, are included in the analysis because they often
license material also from independent photographers. For the year 2005, 201 agencies
were identii ed through the industry association's member directory, own research and
through snowball sampling in the course of data collection. Altogether, 75 agencies com-
pleted the questionnaire, where 70 had at least one sales alliance in rights-managed pho-
