• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.25-57
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• 2012

This study identified motives for writing apparel product reviews in online stores, and determined what motives increase the behavior of writing reviews. It also classified store customers based on the type of writing motives, and clarified the characteristics of internet purchase behavior and of a demographic profile. Data were collected from 252 females aged 20s' and 30s' who have experience of reading and writing reviews on online shopping. The five types of writing motives were altruistic information sharing, remedying of a grievance and vengeance, economic incentives, helping new product development, and the expression of satisfaction feelings. Among five motives, altruistic information sharing, economic incentives, and helping new product development stimulate writing reviews. Store customers who write reviews were classified into three groups based on their writing motive types: Other consumer advocates(29.8%), self-interested shoppers(40.5%) and shoppers with moderate motives(29.8%). There were significant differences among three groups in writing behavior (the frequency of writing reviews, writing intent of reviews, duration of writing reviews, and frequency of online shopping) and age. Based on results, managerial implications were suggested. Long Abstract : The purpose of present study is to identify the types of writing motives on online shopping, and to clarify the motives affecting the behavior of writing reviews. This study also classifies online shoppers based on the motive types, and identifies the characteristics of the classified groups in terms of writing behavior, frequency of online shopping, and demographics. Use and Gratification Theory was adopted in this study. Qualitative research (focus group interview) and quantitative research were used. Korean women(20 to 39 years old) who reported experience with purchasing clothing online, and reading and writing reviews were selected as samples(n=252). Most of the respondents were relatively young (20-34yrs., 86.1%,), single (61.1%), employed(61.1%) and residents living in big cities(50.9%). About 69.8% of respondents read and 40.5% write apparel reviews frequently or very frequently. 24.6% of the respondents indicated an "average" in their writing frequency. Based on the qualitative result of focus group interviews and previous studies on motives for online community activities, measurement items of motives for writing after-purchase reviews were developed. All items were used a five-point Likert scale with endpoints 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree). The degree of writing behavior was measured by items concerning experience of writing reviews, frequency of writing reviews, amount of writing reviews, and intention of writing reviews. A five-point scale(strongly disagree-strongly agree) was employed. SPSS 18.0 was used for exploratory factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis, one-way ANOVA(Scheffe test) and ${\chi}^2$-test. Confirmatory factor analysis and path model analysis were conducted by AMOS 18.0. By conducting principal components factor analysis (varimax rotation, extracting factors with eigenvalues above 1.0) on the measurement items, five factors were identified: Altruistic information sharing, remedying of a grievance and vengeance, economic incentives, helping new product development, and expression of satisfaction feelings(see Table 1). The measurement model including these final items was analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis. The measurement model had good fit indices(GFI=.918, AGFI=.884, RMR=.070, RMSEA=.054, TLI=.941) except for the probability value associated with the ${\chi}^2$ test(${\chi}^2$=189.078, df=109, p=.00). Convergent validities of all variables were confirmed using composite reliability. All SMC values were found to be lower than AVEs confirming discriminant validity. The path model's goodness-of-fit was greater than the recommended limits based on several indices(GFI=.905, AGFI=.872, RMR=.070, RMSEA=.052, TLI=.935; ${\chi}^2$=260.433, df=155, p=.00). Table 2 shows that motives of altruistic information sharing, economic incentives and helping new product development significantly increased the degree of writing product reviews of online shopping. In particular, the effect of altruistic information sharing and pursuit of economic incentives on the behavior of writing reviews were larger than the effect of helping new product development. As shown in table 3, online store shoppers were classified into three groups: Other consumer advocates (29.8%), self-interested shoppers (40.5%), and moderate shoppers (29.8%). There were significant differences among the three groups in the degree of writing reviews (experience of writing reviews, frequency of writing reviews, amount of writing reviews, intention of writing reviews, and duration of writing reviews, frequency of online shopping) and age. For five aspects of writing behavior, the group of other consumer advocates who is mainly comprised of 20s had higher scores than the other two groups. There were not any significant differences between self-interested group and moderate group regarding writing behavior and demographics.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.63-82
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• 2016

Individuals gather information online to resolve problems in their daily lives and make various decisions about the purchase of products or services. With the revolutionary development of information technology, Web 2.0 has allowed more people to easily generate and use online reviews such that the volume of information is rapidly increasing, and the usefulness and significance of analyzing the unstructured data have also increased. This paper presents an analysis on the lexical features of expert product reviews to determine their influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. The focus was on how unstructured data can be organized and used in diverse contexts through text mining. In addition, diverse lexical features of expert reviews of contents provided by a third-party review site were extracted and defined. Expert reviews are defined as evaluations by people who have expert knowledge about specific products or services in newspapers or magazines; this type of review is also called a critic review. Consumers who purchased products before the widespread use of the Internet were able to access expert reviews through newspapers or magazines; thus, they were not able to access many of them. Recently, however, major media also now provide online services so that people can more easily and affordably access expert reviews compared to the past. The reason why diverse reviews from experts in several fields are important is that there is an information asymmetry where some information is not shared among consumers and sellers. The information asymmetry can be resolved with information provided by third parties with expertise to consumers. Then, consumers can read expert reviews and make purchasing decisions by considering the abundant information on products or services. Therefore, expert reviews play an important role in consumers' purchasing decisions and the performance of companies across diverse industries. If the influence of qualitative data such as reviews or assessment after the purchase of products can be separately identified from the quantitative data resources, such as the actual quality of products or price, it is possible to identify which aspects of product reviews hamper or promote product sales. Previous studies have focused on the characteristics of the experts themselves, such as the expertise and credibility of sources regarding expert reviews; however, these studies did not suggest the influence of the linguistic features of experts' product reviews on consumers' overall evaluation. However, this study focused on experts' recommendations and evaluations to reveal the lexical features of expert reviews and whether such features influence consumers' overall evaluations and purchasing decisions. Real expert product reviews were analyzed based on the suggested methodology, and five lexical features of expert reviews were ultimately determined. Specifically, the "review depth" (i.e., degree of detail of the expert's product analysis), and "lack of assurance" (i.e., degree of confidence that the expert has in the evaluation) have statistically significant effects on consumers' product evaluations. In contrast, the "positive polarity" (i.e., the degree of positivity of an expert's evaluations) has an insignificant effect, while the "negative polarity" (i.e., the degree of negativity of an expert's evaluations) has a significant negative effect on consumers' product evaluations. Finally, the "social orientation" (i.e., the degree of how many social expressions experts include in their reviews) does not have a significant effect on consumers' product evaluations. In summary, the lexical properties of the product reviews were defined according to each relevant factor. Then, the influence of each linguistic factor of expert reviews on the consumers' final evaluations was tested. In addition, a test was performed on whether each linguistic factor influencing consumers' product evaluations differs depending on the lexical features. The results of these analyses should provide guidelines on how individuals process massive volumes of unstructured data depending on lexical features in various contexts and how companies can use this mechanism from their perspective. This paper provides several theoretical and practical contributions, such as the proposal of a new methodology and its application to real data.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.49-69
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• 2009

With the proliferation of electronic commerce, online transactions have become a norm. Its enormous potential, however, can be truly realized if consumers feel comfortable facing invisible sellers over the Internet, a virtual business channel. Trust has been identified as a key component in many e-Commerce studies. The purpose of this study is to find out which factors play a major role in building buyer trust and how the build-up trust affects buyer's purchase intention in online used car transactions. Based on the information asymmetry, TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), and the trust theory, our research model includes factors such as a buyer's propensity-to-trust, institutional characteristics (inspection and warranty policy), word-of-mouth referral, perceived size, and perceived benefits as independent variables. The model also includes trust as a mediate variable, purchase intention as a dependent variable, and perceived quality risk as a moderate variable. The research model is tested by analyzing 448 sample data gathered from used car websites. The result shows that the trust has significant effects on the online purchase intention, and institutional characteristics have been identified as one of the most significant factors for trust building in used car websites. For those who perceive quality risk high, actual purchasing behavior occurs only when they have trust on the used car websites, indicating that trust plays a vital role as a mediate variable. This study suggests that buyer trust on the used car websites is important to increase buyer's online purchase behavior.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.195-227
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• 2011

There is no doubt that distribution channels and services greatly satisfy consumers' desires. Lots of products and services, stimulate consumers to purchase products to relieve their depressed feeling/stress temporarily, leading them gradually to a shopping addiction. Shopping addiction generates lots of problems, damaging not only consumers themselves but also other consumers and the entire society. Therefore, the purposes of this study were 1) to examine psychological factors that affected addictive shopping orientation of consumers, 2) to explore the effects addictive shopping orientation on the post-purchase emotions(positive emotion/negative emotion), 3) to examine the effect of post-purchase emotions on post-purchase behaviors (repurchasing/refund and exchange/negative word of mouth). 4) the study explored the differences in terms of effects of addictive shopping orientations on post-purchase emotions and behaviors, depending on the retailing channel (online and off line). The study performed a questionnaire survey for female adults older than 18 years old, living Seoul and Pusan areas. By using 404 copies for questionnaires, factor analysis, reliability analysis, and Amos 7.0 were used for the data analysis. It was found that psychological variables, self-esteem, compensatory buying and impulsiveness, had significant effects on addictive shopping orientations. Addictive shopping orientations affect both positive and negative post-purchase emotions in case of off-line shopping. Negative post-purchase emotions have higher impact on the postpurchase behaviors than positive post-purchase emotions.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.35-51
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• 2019

The two main goals of this study are to derive independent factors affecting the success rate of crowdfunding and to empirically analyze the variation of independent factors' effects on the success of crowdfunding by industry (Internet, culture/art, manufacturing/distribution), and funding type (stock type, bond type). To identify the success factors of crowdfunding for invigoration and strategic utilization, first, several variables were refined after interviews with experts and platform operators with investment experiences in numerous crowdfunding projects. Then, independent factors affecting project involvement were categorized as follows: a characteristic of project, participant activity, and enterprise. Also, the results derived from the influence of independent variables on crowdfunding after moderating effects were driven. Selected independent factors in this study are as follows: crowdfunding period, target amount, visual contents, minimum account money, number of comments, number of SNS followers, level of interest, financial Statement disclosure, investment attraction, venture company, intellectual property rights disclosure, and business operation period. Selected moderating factors in this study are as follows: industry (Internet, culture/art, manufacturing/distribution), and funding type (stock type, bond type). In conclusion, a discussion of the academical and practical implications and a suggestion of directions for further research are explained.

• Journal of the korean academy of Pediatric Dentistry
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.285-299
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• 2022

The aim of this study is to investigate the awareness and perception of pediatric dentists regarding dental health insurance (DHI) system in Korea. Online surveys were sent to the members of the Korean Academy of Pediatric Dentistry (KAPD), and the responses were collected. The survey, consisting of 41 questions, was subdivided into 'general background of the respondents', 'the awareness on national health insurance (NHI) and DHI', 'the awareness on DHI pertaining to pediatric dentistry', 'issues that need improvement on DHI pertaining to pediatric dentistry', 'DHI claims', and 'the roles of KAPD in DHI'. In total, 302 responded, with a response rate of 28.9%. Excluding 2 questionnaires with insufficient answers, a total of 300 survey results were analyzed. According to the analysis, pediatric dentists thought that the coverage of DHI was not as sufficient compared to that of NHI, but were expecting its scope to broaden in the future. The satisfaction rate was higher in pit and fissure sealant and composite resin filling than in caries-detecting quantitative light-induced fluorescence. Pediatric dentists considered permanent tooth composite resin filling (65.7%) needed an increase in insurance copayment, while topical fluoride application (74.7%) to require insurance coverage. DHI claims were generally handled by dental hygienists and/or nursing assistants. Approximately half of the respondents answered that they have had experiences on appealing for insurance denials. Lastly, pediatric dentists generally had a positive attitude towards providing information for the DHI. This study is expected to be used as a sound dataset for the DHI policy development concerning pediatric dentistry.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.55-78
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• 2021

Tosolve complex and diverse social problems and ensure the quality of life of individuals, social robots that can interact with humans are attracting attention. In the past, robots were recognized as beings that provide labor force as they put into industrial sites on behalf of humans. However, the concept of today's robot has been extended to social robots that coexist with humans and enable social interaction with the advent of Smart technology, which is considered an important driver in most industries. Specifically, there are service robots that respond to customers, the robots that have the purpose of edutainment, and the emotionalrobots that can interact with humans intimately. However, popularization of robots is not felt despite the current information environment in the modern ICT service environment and the 4th industrial revolution. Considering social interaction with users which is an important function of social robots, not only the technology of the robots but also other factors should be considered. The design elements of the robot are more important than other factors tomake consumers purchase essentially a social robot. In fact, existing studies on social robots are at the level of proposing "robot development methodology" or testing the effects provided by social robots to users in pieces. On the other hand, consumer emotions felt from the robot's appearance has an important influence in the process of forming user's perception, reasoning, evaluation and expectation. Furthermore, it can affect attitude toward robots and good feeling and performance reasoning, etc. Therefore, this study aims to verify the effect of appearance of social robot and consumer emotions on consumer's attitude toward social robot. At this time, a social robot design evaluation model is constructed by combining heterogeneous data from different sources. Specifically, the three quantitative indicator data for the appearance of social robots from the ABOT Database is included in the model. The consumer emotions of social robot design has been collected through (1) the existing design evaluation literature and (2) online buzzsuch as product reviews and blogs, (3) qualitative interviews for social robot design. Later, we collected the score of consumer emotions and attitudes toward various social robots through a large-scale consumer survey. First, we have derived the six major dimensions of consumer emotions for 23 pieces of detailed emotions through dimension reduction methodology. Then, statistical analysis was performed to verify the effect of derived consumer emotionson attitude toward social robots. Finally, the moderated regression analysis was performed to verify the effect of quantitatively collected indicators of social robot appearance on the relationship between consumer emotions and attitudes toward social robots. Interestingly, several significant moderation effects were identified, these effects are visualized with two-way interaction effect to interpret them from multidisciplinary perspectives. This study has theoretical contributions from the perspective of empirically verifying all stages from technical properties to consumer's emotion and attitudes toward social robots by linking the data from heterogeneous sources. It has practical significance that the result helps to develop the design guidelines based on consumer emotions in the design stage of social robot development.