• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.157-194
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• 2008

The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers. The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability. In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it. In this study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels; characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things. And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to-consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of products such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and make some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher than at other community sites. It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities. Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences: consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users. As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that shows close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consumers do not want to spend money to buy content and etc. In this sense, marketers of community websites must know consumers' affect toward online community site is not a last goal and important factor to influnece consumers' purchase. Third, building good content environment can be a really important marketing tool to create a competitive advantage in cyberspace. For example, Cyworld, Korea's number one community site shows distinctive superiority in the consumer evaluations of content characteristics such as content superiority, site vividness, and customerization. Particularly, comsumer evaluation about customerization was remarkably higher than the other sites. In this point, we can conclude that providing comsumers with good, unique and highly customized content will be urgent and important task directly and indirectly impacting to self congruency, consumer experience, c-to-c interactivity, and various loyalty factors of online community. By creating enjoyable, useful, and unique online community environments, online community portals such as Daum, Naver, and Cyworld are able to build customer loyalty to a degree that many of today's online marketer can only dream of these loyalty, in turn, generates strong economic returns. Another way to build good online community site is to provide consumers with an interactive, fun, experience-oriented or experiential Web site. Elements that can make a dot.com's Web site experiential include graphics, 3-D images, animation, video and audio capabilities. In addition, chat rooms and real-time customer service applications (which link site visitors directly to other visitors, or with company support personnel, respectively) are also being used to make web sites more interactive. Researchers note that online communities are increasingly incorporating such applications in their Web sites, in order to make consumers' online shopping experience more similar to that of an offline store. That is, if consumers are able to experience sensory stimulation (e.g. via 3-D images and audio sound), interact with other consumers (e.g., via chat rooms), and interact with sales or support people (e.g. via a real-time chat interface or e-mail), then they are likely to have a more positive dot.com experience, and develop a more positive image toward the online company itself). Analysts caution, however, that, while high quality graphics, animation and the like may create a fun experience for consumers, when heavily used, they can slow site navigation, resulting in frustrated consumers, who may never return to a site. Consequently, some analysts suggest that, at least with current technology, the rule-of-thumb is that less is more. That is, while graphics etc. can draw consumers to a site, they should be kept to a minimum, so as not to impact negatively on consumers' overall site experience.

• 한국벤처창업학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.265-288
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• 2009

The study has found that the main reasons affecting to the mature conjugal relations of middle-aged persons are closely related with sede factors brought about after marriage. Comparatively the factors before marriage have more or less weak power on the conjugal relations. They are mature relations wp between husbands and wives, stable and enough incede, and religious activities, which have deep relations with the satisfactory conjugal relations. C. G. Jung divided the whole life span as self-assuredness period in the first half and self-convergence period in the second half. The first is the period when one does his or her best to get external and physical self. On the contrary, the second is the middle-aged period one finds his or her meaning of life in the religious, philosophical, intuitional, and spiritual world, which lead life into harmony and integration. Therefore if one overcomes some psychological crisis related with middle-aged development he or she can enjoy happy senescence(old age). The study has suggested through literature investigation the definition of middle age and the developmental traits of middle age, and the relations between religions and conjugal relations of middle-aged husbands and wives. Futhermore, it has analyzed the theories which religions have close relations with the life satisfaction of middle-aged conjugal relations. In order to give an analysis the influence of the variable of religious activities and religious maturity, with the degree of conjugal satisfaction, 400 middle age are selected as the object of the study whose ages are ranging from 35 years to 60 years, and who reside in Seoul or near Seoul. They were asked to fill out the questionnaires asking about religious activities, religious maturity, and the conjugal satisfaction from March 25th to April 30th, 2009. The results of the survey have been statistically processed and analyzed. First, the higher religious maturity gives positive influence on the general religious activities including public service, human relations, and spiritual stability. That is, this result indicates that the individual, spiritual, and formal religious activities give to a degree influence on the religious maturity. Second, the maturity of religious life resulting from religious activities has a causation with the satisfaction of conjugal life. In more details, religious activities has a positive influence on the satisfaction of conjugal life(T=31.36, p<.001) In more details, religious activities has a positive influence on the religious maturity(T=31.36, p<.001), and religious activities has a positive influence on the satisfaction of conjugal life(T=33.81, p<.001), and the religious maturity has a positive influence on the satisfaction of conjugal life(T=28.64, p<.001) Third, as we analyze the main effects which religious activities and the religious maturity could give influence on the satisfaction of conjugal life, it is found that both religious activities(F=15.95, p<.001) and the religious maturity(F=23.94, p<.001) give a positive influence on the satisfaction of conjugal life. In conclusion, it is sure that religious activities and the religious maturity have a close relations with the satisfaction of conjugal life. Therefore it can be said that religious activities at the protestant religion, buddhism, and catholic religion can give an important influence on the satisfaction of middle-aged conjugal life.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.157-168
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• 2014

We investigated the anti-obesity effects of small colored potato extracts by high pressure water extraction process on body weight, plasma lipid levels in high-fat diet-induced obese mice. Experimental groups were divided into basal diet only (Normal), high fat diet control (HFD), small colored potato water extracts (CP), and high-fat diet and small colored potato water high pressure extracts (HCP) groups. The levels of hematological variables were not significantly different among the four groups. Compared with the HFD group's serum total cholesterol level of $86.01{\pm}1.16mg/dL$, the levels of the CP and HCP groups were significantly lowered to $80.29{\pm}1.28$ and $77.21{\pm}4.21mg/dL$, respectively. Compared with the HFD group's LDL-cholesterol level of $18.92{\pm}2.44mg/dL$, the LDL-cholesterol levels of the CP and HCP groups were significantly lowered to $13.52{\pm}1.26$ and $12.93{\pm}1.26mg/dL$, respectively. Also, compared to the HFD group's serum triglyceride level of $82.71{\pm}3.94mg/dL$, the level of the HCP group was significantly lowered to $63.24{\pm}6.32mg/dL$. These results suggested that dietary supplementation of small colored potato extracts using high pressure water extraction does not have any adverse effects on the hematological variables, while improving the lipid content and reducing hepatic damage of the high-fat fed rats.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.103-128
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• 2013

When a consumer needs a product or service and multiple sellers are available online, the process of selecting a seller to buy online from is complex since the process involves many behavioral dimensions that have to be taken into account. As a part of this selection process, consumers may set minimum trust expectation that can be used to screen out less trustworthy sellers. In the previous research, the level of consumers' trust expectation has been anchored on two important factors: product involvement and perceived risk. Product involvement refers to the extent to which a consumer perceives a specific product important. Thus, the higher product involvement may result in the higher trust expectation in sellers. On the other hand, other related studies found that when consumers perceived a higher level of risk (e.g., credit card fraud risk), they set higher trust expectation as well. While abundant research exists addressing the relationship between product involvement and perceived risk, little attention has been paid to the integrative view of the link between the two constructs and their impacts on the trust expectation. The present paper is a step toward filling this research gap. The purpose of this paper is to understand the process by which a consumer chooses an online merchant by examining the relationships among product involvement, perceived risk, trust expectation, and intention to buy from an e-tailer. We specifically focus on the mediating role of perceived risk in the relationships between enduring product involvement and the trust expectation. That is, we question whether product involvement affects the trust expectation directly without mediation or indirectly mediated by perceived risk. The research model with four hypotheses was initially tested using data gathered from 635 respondents through an online survey method. The structural equation modeling technique with partial least square was used to validate the instrument and the proposed model. The results showed that three out of the four hypotheses formulated were supported. First, we found that the intention to buy from a digital storefront is positively and significantly influenced by the trust expectation, providing support for H4 (trust expectation ${\rightarrow}$ purchase intention). Second, perceived risk was found to be a strong predictor of trust expectation, supporting H2 as well (perceived risk ${\rightarrow}$ trust expectation). Third, we did not find any evidence of direct influence of product involvement, which caused H3 to be rejected (product involvement ${\rightarrow}$ trust expectation). Finally, we found significant positive relationship between product involvement and perceived risk (H1: product involvement ${\rightarrow}$ perceived risk), which suggests that the possibility of complete mediation of perceived risk in the relationship between enduring product involvement and the trust expectation. As a result, we conducted an additional test for the mediation effect by comparing the original model with the revised model without the mediator variable of perceived risk. Indeed, we found that there exists a strong influence of product involvement on the trust expectation (by intentionally eliminating the variable of perceived risk) that was suppressed (i.e., mediated) by the perceived risk in the original model. The Sobel test statistically confirmed the complete mediation effect. Results of this study offer the following key findings. First, enduring product involvement is positively related to perceived risk, implying that the higher a consumer is enduringly involved with a given product, the greater risk he or she is likely to perceive with regards to the online purchase of the product. Second, perceived risk is positively related to trust expectation. A consumer with great risk perceptions concerning the online purchase is likely to buy from a highly trustworthy online merchant, thereby mitigating potential risks. Finally, product involvement was found to have no direct influence on trust expectation, but the relationship between the two constructs was indirect and mediated by the perceived risk. This is perhaps an important theoretical integration of two separate streams of literature on product involvement and perceived risk. The present research also provides useful implications for practitioners as well as academicians. First, one implication for practicing managers in online retail stores is that they should invest in reducing the perceived risk of consumers in order to lower down the trust expectation and thus increasing the consumer's intention to purchase products or services. Second, an academic implication is that perceived risk mediates the relationship between enduring product involvement and trust expectation. Further research is needed to elaborate the theoretical relationships among the constructs under consideration.

• Journal of Gastric Cancer
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.67-77
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• 2022

Purpose: Tegafur/gimeracil/oteracil (S-1) and capecitabine plus oxaliplatin (CAPOX) are standard adjuvant chemotherapies (ACs) administered after gastrectomy to patients with stage II or III gastric cancer. However, the efficacy of AC in elderly patients remains unclear. The objective of this retrospective multicenter cohort study was to compare the efficacies of S-1 and CAPOX AC in patients aged ≥70 years. Materials and Methods: Nine hundred eighty-three patients who were treated with AC using S-1 (768 patients) or CAPOX (215 patients) were enrolled in this study. Each patient underwent AC after curative gastrectomy for stage II or III gastric cancer at one of 27 hospitals in the Republic of Korea between January 2012 and December 2013. Relapse-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS) were analyzed according to AC regimen and age group. Results: Of the 983 patients, 254 (25.8%) were elderly. This group had a similar RFS (P=0.099) but significantly poorer OS (p=0.003) compared with the non-elderly group. Subgroup analysis of the non-elderly group revealed no AC-associated differences in survival. Subgroup analysis of the elderly group revealed significantly better survival in the S-1 group than in the CAPOX group (RFS, P<0.001; OS, P<0.001). Multivariate analysis revealed that the CAPOX regimen was an independent poor prognostic factor for RFS (hazard ratio [HR], 1.891; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.072-3.333; P=0.028) and OS (HR, 2.970; 95% CI, 1.550-5.692; P=0.001). Conclusions: This multicenter observational cohort study found significant differences in RFS and OS between S-1 and CAPOX AC among patients with gastric cancer aged ≥70 years.

• Journal of Korean Port Research
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.35-46
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• 1998

The CY can be said to function in various respect as a buffer zone between the maritime and overland inflow-outflow of container. The amount of storage area needed requires a very critical appraisal at pre-operational stage. A container terminal should be designed to handle and store containers in the most efficient and economic way possible. In order to achieve this aim it is necessary to figure out or forecast numbers and types of containers to be handled, CY area required, and internal handling systems to be adopted. This paper aims to calculate the CY area required for each container handling system in Mokpo New Port. The CY area required are directly dependent on the equipment being used and the storage demand. And also the CY area required depends on the dwell time. Furthermore, containers need to be segregated by destination, weight, class, FCL(full container load), LCL(less than container load), direction of travel, and sometimes by type and often by shipping line or service. Thus the full use of a storage area is not always possible as major unbalances and fluctuations in these flow occuring all the time. The calculating CY area must therefore be taken into account in terms of these operational factors. For solving such problem, all these factors have been applied to estimation of CY area in Mokpo New Port. The CY area required in Mokpo New Port was summarized in the conclusion section.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.185-202
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• 2012

.Since the value of information has been realized in the information society, the usage and collection of information has become important. A facial expression that contains thousands of information as an artistic painting can be described in thousands of words. Followed by the idea, there has recently been a number of attempts to provide customers and companies with an intelligent service, which enables the perception of human emotions through one's facial expressions. For example, MIT Media Lab, the leading organization in this research area, has developed the human emotion prediction model, and has applied their studies to the commercial business. In the academic area, a number of the conventional methods such as Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) or Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied to predict human emotion in prior studies. However, MRA is generally criticized because of its low prediction accuracy. This is inevitable since MRA can only explain the linear relationship between the dependent variables and the independent variable. To mitigate the limitations of MRA, some studies like Jung and Kim (2012) have used ANN as the alternative, and they reported that ANN generated more accurate prediction than the statistical methods like MRA. However, it has also been criticized due to over fitting and the difficulty of the network design (e.g. setting the number of the layers and the number of the nodes in the hidden layers). Under this background, we propose a novel model using Support Vector Regression (SVR) in order to increase the prediction accuracy. SVR is an extensive version of Support Vector Machine (SVM) designated to solve the regression problems. The model produced by SVR only depends on a subset of the training data, because the cost function for building the model ignores any training data that is close (within a threshold ${\varepsilon}$) to the model prediction. Using SVR, we tried to build a model that can measure the level of arousal and valence from the facial features. To validate the usefulness of the proposed model, we collected the data of facial reactions when providing appropriate visual stimulating contents, and extracted the features from the data. Next, the steps of the preprocessing were taken to choose statistically significant variables. In total, 297 cases were used for the experiment. As the comparative models, we also applied MRA and ANN to the same data set. For SVR, we adopted '${\varepsilon}$-insensitive loss function', and 'grid search' technique to find the optimal values of the parameters like C, d, ${\sigma}^2$, and ${\varepsilon}$. In the case of ANN, we adopted a standard three-layer backpropagation network, which has a single hidden layer. The learning rate and momentum rate of ANN were set to 10%, and we used sigmoid function as the transfer function of hidden and output nodes. We performed the experiments repeatedly by varying the number of nodes in the hidden layer to n/2, n, 3n/2, and 2n, where n is the number of the input variables. The stopping condition for ANN was set to 50,000 learning events. And, we used MAE (Mean Absolute Error) as the measure for performance comparison. From the experiment, we found that SVR achieved the highest prediction accuracy for the hold-out data set compared to MRA and ANN. Regardless of the target variables (the level of arousal, or the level of positive / negative valence), SVR showed the best performance for the hold-out data set. ANN also outperformed MRA, however, it showed the considerably lower prediction accuracy than SVR for both target variables. The findings of our research are expected to be useful to the researchers or practitioners who are willing to build the models for recognizing human emotions.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.59-69
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• 2010

Green or an environmental consciousness has been a major issue for businesses and government offices, as well as consumers, worldwide. In response to this movement, the Korean government announced, in the early 2000s, the era of "Green Growth" as a way to encourage green-related business activities. The Korean fashion industry, in various levels of involvement, presents diverse eco-friendly products as a part of the green movement. These apparel products include organic products and recycled clothing. For these companies to be successful, they need information about who are the consumers who consider green issues (e.g., environmental sustainability) as part of their personal values when making a decision for product purchase, use, and disposal. These consumers can be considered as eco-sumers. Previous studies have examined consumers' purchase intention for or with eco-friendly products. In addition, studies have examined influential factors used to identify the eco-sumers or green consumers. However, limited attention was paid to eco-sumers' disposal or recycling behavior of clothes in comparison with their green product purchases. Clothing disposal behaviors are ways that consumer can get rid of unused clothing and in clue temporarily lending the item or permanently eliminating the item by "handing down" (e.g., giving it to a younger sibling), donating, exchanging, selling, or simply throwing it away. Accordingly, examining purchasing behaviors of eco-friendly fashion items in conjunction with clothing disposal behaviors should improve understanding of a consumer's clothing consumption behavior from the environmental perspective. The purpose of this exploratory study is to provide descriptive information about Korean eco-sumers who have ecologically-favorable lifestyles and behaviors when buying and disposing of clothes. The objectives of this study are to (a) categorize Koreans on the basis of clothing disposal behaviors; (b) investigate the differences in demographics, lifestyles, and clothing consumption values among segments; and (c) compare the purchase intention of eco-friendly fashion items and influential factors among segments. A self-administered questionnaire was developed based on previous studies. The questionnaire included 10 items of clothing disposal behavior, 22 items of LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) characteristics, and 19 items of consumption values, measured by five-point Likert-type scales. In addition, the purchase intention of two eco-friendly fashion items and 11 attributes of each item were measured by seven-point Likert type scales. Two polyester fleece pullovers, made from fabric created from recycled bottles with the PET identification code, were selected from one Korean brand and one US imported brand among outdoor sportswear brands. A brief description of each product with a color picture was provided in the survey. Demographic variables (i.e., gender, age, marital status, education level, income, occupation) were also included. The data were collected through a professional web survey agency during May 2009. A total of 600 final usable questionnaires were analyzed. The age of respondents ranged from 20 to 49 years old with a mean age of 34 years. Fifty percent of the respondents were males and about 58% were married, and 62% reported having earned university degrees. Principal components factor analysis with varimax rotation was used to identify the underlying dimensions of the clothing disposal behavior scale, and three factors were generated (i.e., reselling behavior, donating behavior, non-recycling behavior). To categorize the respondents on the basis of clothing disposal behaviors, k-mean cluster analysis was used, and three segments were obtained. These consumer segments were labeled as 'Resale Group', 'Donation Group', and 'Non-Recycling Group.' The classification results indicated approximately 98 percent of the original cases were correctly classified. With respect to demographic characteristics among the three segments, significant differences were found in gender, marital status, occupation, and age. LOHAS characteristics were reduced into the following five factors: self-satisfaction, family orientation, health concern, environmental concern, and voluntary service. Significant differences were found in the LOHAS factors among the three clusters. Resale Group and Donation Group showed a similar predisposition to LOHAS issues while the Non-Recycling Group presented the lowest mean scores on the LOHAS factors compared to the other segments. The Resale and Donation Groups described themselves as enjoying or being satisfied with their lives and spending spare-time with family. In addition, these two groups cared about health and organic foods, and tried to conserve energy and resources. Principal components factor analysis generated clothing consumption values into the following three factors: personal values, social value, and practical value. The ANOVA test with the factors showed differences primarily between the Resale Group and the other two groups. The Resale Group was more concerned about personal value and social value than the other segments. In contrast, the Non-Recycling Group presented the higher level of social value than did Donation Group. In a comparison of the intention to purchase eco-friendly products, the Resale Group showed the highest mean score on intent to purchase Product A. On the other hand, the Donation Group presented the highest intention to purchase for Product B among segments. In addition, the mean scores indicated that the Korean product (Product B) was more preferable for purchase than the U.S. product (Product A). Stepwise regression analysis was used to identify the influence of product attributes on the purchase intention of eco product. With respect to Product A, design, price and contribution to environmental preservation were significant to predict purchase intention for the Resale Group, while price and compatibility with my image factors were significant for the Donation Group. For the Non-Recycling Group, design, price compatibility with the factors of my image, participation to eco campaign, and contribution to environmental preservation were significant. Price appropriateness was significant for each of the three clusters. With respect to Product B, design, price and compatibility with my image factors were important, but different attributes were associated significantly with purchase intention for each of the three groups. The influence of LOHAS characteristics and clothing consumption values on intention to purchase Products A and B were also examined. The LOHAS factor of health concern and the personal value factor were significant in the relationships with the purchase intention; however, the explanatory powers were low in the three segments. Findings showed that each group as classified by clothing disposal behaviors showed differences in the attributes of a product, personal values, and the LOHAS characteristics that influenced their purchase intention of eco-friendly products. Findings would enable organizations to understand eco-friendly behavior and to design appropriate strategic decisions to appeal eco-sumers.