Global Cosmetics Trends and Cosmceuticals for 21st Century Asia (화장품의 세계적인 개발동향과 21세기 아시아인을 위한 기능성 화장품)
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- Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Scientists of Korea
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- v.23 no.1
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- pp.5-20
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- 1997
War and poverty depress the consumption of cosmetics, while peace and prosperity encourage their proliferation. With the end of World War II, the US, Europe and Japan witnessed rapid growth of their cosmetic industries. The ending of the Cold War has stimulated the growth of the industry in Eastern Europe. Improved economies, and mass communication are also responsible for the fast growth of the cosmetic industries in many Asian nations. The rapid development of the cosmetic industry in mainland China over the past decade proves that changing economies and political climates can deeply affect the health of our business. In addition to war, economy, political climate and mass communication, factors such as lifestyle, religion, morality and value concepts, can also affect the growth of our industry. Cosmetics are the product of the society. As society and the needs of its people change, cosmetics also evolve with respect to their contents, packaging, distribution, marketing concepts, and emphasis. In many ways, cosmetics mirror our society, reflecting social changes. Until the early 70's, cosmetics in the US were primarily developed for white women. The civil rights movement of the 60's gave birth to ethnic cosmetics, and products designed for African-Americans became popular in the 70's and 80's. The consumerism of the 70's led the FDA to tighten cosmetic regulations, forcing manufacturers to disclose ingredients on their labels. The result was the spread of safety-oriented, "hypoallergenic" cosmetics and more selective use of ingredients. The new ingredient labeling law in Europe is also likely to affect the manner in which development chemists choose ingredients for new products. Environmental pollution, too, can affect cosmetics trends. For example, the concern over ozone depletion in the stratosphere has promoted the consumption of suncare products. Similarly, the popularity of natural cosmetic ingredients, the search of non-animal testing methods, and ecology-conscious cosmetic packaging seen in recent years all reflect the profound influences of our changing world. In the 1980's, a class of efficacy-oriented skin-care products, which the New York Times dubbed "serious" cosmetics, emerged in the US. "Cosmeceuticals" refer to hybrids of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals which have gained importance in the US in the 90's and are quickly spreading world-wide. In spite of regulatory problems, consumer demand and new technologies continue to encourage their development. New classes of cosmeceuticals are emerging to meet the demands of increasingly affluent Asian consumers as we enter the 21st century. as we enter the 21st century.
To date, we have considered the theoretical views, the standpoint of states and the discourse within the international community such as the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space(COPUOS) regarding the Air/Outer Space Boundary Question which is one of the first issues of UN COPUOS established in line with marking the starting point of Outer Space Area. As above mentioned, discussions in the United Nations and among scholars of within each state regarding the delimitation issue often saw a division between those in favor of a functional approach (the functionalists) and those seeking the delineation of a boundary (the spatialists). The spatialists emphasize that the boundary between air and outer space should be delimited because the status of outer space is a type of public domain from which sovereign jurisdiction is excluded, as stated in Article 2 of Outer Space Treaty. On the contrary art. I of Chicago Convention is evidence of the acknowledgement of sovereignty over airspace existing as an international customary law, has the binding force of which exists independently of the Convention. The functionalists, backed initially by the major space powers, which viewed any boundary demarcation as possibly restricting their access to space, whether for peaceful or non-military purposes, considered it insufficient or inadequate to delimit a boundary of outer space without obvious scientific and technological evidences. Last more than 50 years there were large development in the exploration and use of outer space. But a large number states including those taking the view of a functionalist have taken on a negative attitude. As the element of location is a decisive factor for the choice of the legal regime to be applied, a purely functional approach to the regulation of activities in the space above the Earth does not offer a solution. It seems therefore to welcome the arrival of clear evidence of a growing recognition of and national practices concerning a spatial approach to the problem is gaining support both by a large number of States as well as by publicists. The search for a solution to the problem of demarcating the two different legal regimes governing the space above Earth has undoubtedly been facilitated and a number of countries including Russia have already advocated the acceptance of the lowest perigee boundary of outer space at a height of 100km. As a matter of fact the lowest perigee where space objects are still able to continue in their orbiting around the earth has already been imposed as a natural criterion for the delimitation of outer space. This delimitation of outer space has also been evidenced by the constant practice of a large number of States and their tacit consent to space activities accomplished so far at this distance and beyond it. Of course there are still numerous opposing views on the delineation of a outer space boundary by space powers like U.S.A., England, France and so on. Therefore, first of all to solve the legal issues faced by the international community in outer space activities like delimitation problem, there needs a positive and peaceful will of international cooperation. From this viewpoint, President John F. Kennedy once described the rationale behind the outer space activities in his famous "Moon speech" given at Rice University in 1962. He called upon Americans and all mankind to strive for peaceful cooperation and coexistence in our future outer space activities. And Kennedy explained, "There is no strife,
This study investigated consumer intention to use a location-based mobile shopping service (LBMSS) that integrates cognitive and affective responses. Information relevancy was integrated into pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) emotional state model in the present study as a conceptual framework. The results of an online survey of 335 mobile phone users in the U.S. indicated the positive effects of arousal and information relevancy on pleasure. In addition, there was a significant relationship between pleasure and intention to use a LBMSS. However, the relationship between dominance and pleasure was not statistically significant. The results of the present study provides insight to retailers and marketers as to what factors they need to consider to implement location-based mobile shopping services to improve their business performance. Extended Abstract : Location aware technology has expanded the marketer's reach by reducing space and time between a consumer's receipt of advertising and purchase, offering real-time information and coupons to consumers in purchasing situations (Dickenger and Kleijnen, 2008; Malhotra and Malhotra, 2009). LBMSS increases the relevancy of SMS marketing by linking advertisements to a user's location (Bamba and Barnes, 2007; Malhotra and Malhotra, 2009). This study investigated consumer intention to use a location-based mobile shopping service (LBMSS) that integrates cognitive and affective response. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship among information relevancy and affective variables and their effects on intention to use LBMSS. Thus, information relevancy was integrated into pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) model and generated the following hypotheses. Hypothesis 1. There will be a positive influence of arousal concerning LBMSS on pleasure in regard to LBMSS. Hypothesis 2. There will be a positive influence of dominance in LBMSS on pleasure in regard to LBMSS. Hypothesis 3. There will be a positive influence of information relevancy on pleasure in regard to LBMSS. Hypothesis 4. There will be a positive influence of pleasure about LBMSS on intention to use LBMSS. E-mail invitations were sent out to a randomly selected sample of three thousand consumers who are older than 18 years old and mobile phone owners, acquired from an independent marketing research company. An online survey technique was employed utilizing Dillman's (2000) online survey method and follow-ups. A total of 335 valid responses were used for the data analysis in the present study. Before the respondents answer any of the questions, they were told to read a document describing LBMSS. The document included definitions and examples of LBMSS provided by various service providers. After that, they were exposed to a scenario describing the participant as taking a saturday shopping trip to a mall and then receiving a short message from the mall. The short message included new product information and coupons for same day use at participating stores. They then completed a questionnaire containing various questions. To assess arousal, dominance, and pleasure, we adapted and modified scales used in the previous studies in the context of location-based mobile shopping service, each of the five items from Mehrabian and Russell (1974). A total of 15 items were measured on a seven-point bipolar scale. To measure information relevancy, four items were borrowed from Mason et al. (1995). Intention to use LBMSS was captured using two items developed by Blackwell, and Miniard (1995) and one items developed by the authors. Data analyses were conducted using SPSS 19.0 and LISREL 8.72. A total of usable 335 data were obtained after deleting the incomplete responses, which results in a response rate of 11.20%. A little over half of the respondents were male (53.9%) and approximately 60% of respondents were married (57.4%). The mean age of the sample was 29.44 years with a range from 19 to 60 years. In terms of the ethnicity there were European Americans (54.5%), Hispanic American (5.3%), African-American (3.6%), and Asian American (2.9%), respectively. The respondents were highly educated; close to 62.5% of participants in the study reported holding a college degree or its equivalent and 14.5% of the participants had graduate degree. The sample represents all income categories: less than $24,999 (10.8%), $25,000-$49,999 (28.34%), $50,000-$74,999 (13.8%), and $75,000 or more (10.23%). The respondents of the study indicated that they were employed in many occupations. Responses came from all 42 states in the U.S. To identify the dimensions of research constructs, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using a varimax rotation was conducted. As indicated in table 1, these dimensions: arousal, dominance, relevancy, pleasure, and intention to use, suggested by the EFA, explained 82.29% of the total variance with factor loadings ranged from .74 to .89. As a next step, CFA was conducted to validate the dimensions that were identified from the exploratory factor analysis and to further refine the scale. Table 1 exhibits the results of measurement model analysis and revealed a chi-square of 202.13 with degree-of-freedom of 89 (p =.002), GFI of .93, AGFI = .89, CFI of .99, NFI of .98, which indicates of the evidence of a good model fit to the data (Bagozzi and Yi, 1998; Hair et al., 1998). As table 1 shows, reliability was estimated with Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability (CR) for all multi-item scales. All the values met evidence of satisfactory reliability in multi-item measure for alpha (>.91) and CR (>.80). In addition, we tested the convergent validity of the measure using average variance extracted (AVE) by following recommendations from Fornell and Larcker (1981). The AVE values for the model constructs ranged from .74 through .85, which are higher than the threshold suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981). To examine discriminant validity of the measure, we again followed the recommendations from Fornell and Larcker (1981). The shared variances between constructs were smaller than the AVE of the research constructs and confirm discriminant validity of the measure. The causal model testing was conducted using LISREL 8.72 with a maximum-likelihood estimation method. Table 2 shows the results of the hypotheses testing. The results for the conceptual model revealed good overall fit for the proposed model. Chi-square was 342.00 (df = 92, p =.000), NFI was .97, NNFI was .97, GFI was .89, AGFI was .83, and RMSEA was .08. All paths in the proposed model received significant statistical support except H2. The paths from arousal to pleasure (H1:
Social media has become one of the most popular media in web and mobile application. In 2011, social networks and blogs are still the top destination of online users, according to a study from Nielsen Company. In their studies, nearly 4 in 5active users visit social network and blog. Social Networks and Blogs sites rule Americans' Internet time, accounting to 23 percent of time spent online. Facebook is the main social network that the U.S internet users spend time more than the other social network services such as Yahoo, Google, AOL Media Network, Twitter, Linked In and so on. In recent trend, most of the companies promote their products in the Facebook by creating the "Facebook Page" that refers to specific product. The "Like" option allows user to subscribed and received updates their interested on from the page. The film makers which produce a lot of films around the world also take part to market and promote their films by exploiting the advantages of using the "Facebook Page". In addition, a great number of streaming service providers allows users to subscribe their service to watch and enjoy movies and TV program. They can instantly watch movies and TV program over the internet to PCs, Macs and TVs. Netflix alone as the world's leading subscription service have more than 30 million streaming members in the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom and the Nordics. As the matter of facts, a million of movies and TV program with different of genres are offered to the subscriber. In contrast, users need spend a lot time to find the right movies which are related to their interest genre. Recent years there are many researchers who have been propose a method to improve prediction the rating or preference that would give the most related items such as books, music or movies to the garget user or the group of users that have the same interest in the particular items. One of the most popular methods to build recommendation system is traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF). The method compute the similarity of the target user and other users, which then are cluster in the same interest on items according which items that users have been rated. The method then predicts other items from the same group of users to recommend to a group of users. Moreover, There are many items that need to study for suggesting to users such as books, music, movies, news, videos and so on. However, in this paper we only focus on movie as item to recommend to users. In addition, there are many challenges for CF task. Firstly, the "sparsity problem"; it occurs when user information preference is not enough. The recommendation accuracies result is lower compared to the neighbor who composed with a large amount of ratings. The second problem is "cold-start problem"; it occurs whenever new users or items are added into the system, which each has norating or a few rating. For instance, no personalized predictions can be made for a new user without any ratings on the record. In this research we propose a clustering method according to the users' genre interest extracted from social network service (SNS) and user's movies rating information system to solve the "cold-start problem." Our proposed method will clusters the target user together with the other users by combining the user genre interest and the rating information. It is important to realize a huge amount of interesting and useful user's information from Facebook Graph, we can extract information from the "Facebook Page" which "Like" by them. Moreover, we use the Internet Movie Database(IMDb) as the main dataset. The IMDbis online databases that consist of a large amount of information related to movies, TV programs and including actors. This dataset not only used to provide movie information in our Movie Rating Systems, but also as resources to provide movie genre information which extracted from the "Facebook Page". Formerly, the user must login with their Facebook account to login to the Movie Rating System, at the same time our system will collect the genre interest from the "Facebook Page". We conduct many experiments with other methods to see how our method performs and we also compare to the other methods. First, we compared our proposed method in the case of the normal recommendation to see how our system improves the recommendation result. Then we experiment method in case of cold-start problem. Our experiment show that our method is outperform than the other methods. In these two cases of our experimentation, we see that our proposed method produces better result in case both cases.
With the continued globalization of world markets, transfer pricing has become one of the dominant sources of controversy in international taxation. Transfer pricing is the process by which a multinational corporation calculates a price for goods and services that are transferred to affiliated entities. Consider a Korean electronic enterprise that buys supplies from its own subsidiary located in China. How much the Korean parent company pays its subsidiary will determine how much profit the Chinese unit reports in local taxes. If the parent company pays above normal market prices, it may appear to have a poor profit, even if the group as a whole shows a respectable profit margin. In this way, transfer prices impact the taxable income reported in each country in which the multinational enterprise operates. It's importance lies in that around 60% of international trade involves transactions between two related parts of multinationals, according to the OECD. Multinational enterprises (hereafter MEs) exert much effort into utilizing organizational advantages to make global investments. MEs wish to minimize their tax burden. So MEs spend a fortune on economists and accountants to justify transfer prices that suit their tax needs. On the contrary, local governments are not prepared to cope with MEs' powerful financial instruments. Tax authorities in each country wish to ensure that the tax base of any ME is divided fairly. Thus, both tax authorities and MEs have a vested interest in the way in which a transfer price is determined, and this is why MEs' international transfer prices are at the center of disputes concerned with taxation. Transfer pricing issues and practices are sometimes difficult to control for regulators because the tax administration does not have enough staffs with the knowledge and resources necessary to understand them. The authors examine transfer pricing practices to provide relevant resources useful in designing tax incentives and regulation schemes for policy makers. This study focuses on identifying the relevant business and environmental factors that could influence the international transfer pricing of MEs. In this perspective, we empirically investigate how the management perception of related variables influences their choice of international transfer pricing methods. We believe that this research is particularly useful in the design of tax policy. Because it can concentrate on a few selected factors in consideration of the limited budget of the tax administration with assistance of this research. Data is composed of questionnaire responses from foreign firms in Korea with investment balances exceeding one million dollars in the end of 2004. We mailed questionnaires to 861 managers in charge of the accounting departments of each company, resulting in 121 valid responses. Seventy six percent of the sample firms are classified as small and medium sized enterprises with assets below 100 billion Korean won. Reviewing transfer pricing methods, cost-based transfer pricing is most popular showing that 60 firms have adopted it. The market-based method is used by 31 firms, and 13 firms have reported the resale-pricing method. Regarding the nationalities of foreign investors, the Japanese and the Americans constitute most of the sample. Logistic regressions have been performed for statistical analysis. The dependent variable is binary in that whether the method of international transfer pricing is a market-based method or a cost-based method. This type of binary classification is founded on the belief that the market-based method is evaluated as the relatively objective way of pricing compared with the cost-based methods. Cost-based pricing is assumed to give mangers flexibility in transfer pricing decisions. Therefore, local regulatory agencies are thought to prefer market-based pricing over cost-based pricing. Independent variables are composed of eight factors such as corporate tax rate, tariffs, relations with local tax authorities, tax audit, equity ratios of local investors, volume of internal trade, sales volume, and product life cycle. The first four variables are included in the model because taxation lies in the center of transfer pricing disputes. So identifying the impact of these variables in Korean business environments is much needed. Equity ratio is included to represent the interest of local partners. Volume of internal trade was sometimes employed in previous research to check the pricing behavior of managers, so we have followed these footsteps in this paper. Product life cycle is used as a surrogate of competition in local markets. Control variables are firm size and nationality of foreign investors. Firm size is controlled using dummy variables in that whether or not the specific firm is small and medium sized. This is because some researchers report that big firms show different behaviors compared with small and medium sized firms in transfer pricing. The other control variable is also expressed in dummy variable showing if the entrepreneur is the American or not. That's because some prior studies conclude that the American management style is different in that they limit branch manger's freedom of decision. Reviewing the statistical results, we have found that managers prefer the cost-based method over the market-based method as the importance of corporate taxes and tariffs increase. This result means that managers need flexibility to lessen the tax burden when they feel taxes are important. They also prefer the cost-based method as the product life cycle matures, which means that they support subsidiaries in local market competition using cost-based transfer pricing. On the contrary, as the relationship with local tax authorities becomes more important, managers prefer the market-based method. That is because market-based pricing is a better way to maintain good relations with the tax officials. Other variables like tax audit, volume of internal transactions, sales volume, and local equity ratio have shown only insignificant influence. Additionally, we have replaced two tax variables(corporate taxes and tariffs) with the data showing top marginal tax rate and mean tariff rates of each country, and have performed another regression to find if we could get different results compared with the former one. As a consequence, we have found something different on the part of mean tariffs, that shows only an insignificant influence on the dependent variable. We guess that each company in the sample pays tariffs with a specific rate applied only for one's own company, which could be located far from mean tariff rates. Therefore we have concluded we need a more detailed data that shows the tariffs of each company if we want to check the role of this variable. Considering that the present paper has heavily relied on questionnaires, an effort to build a reliable data base is needed for enhancing the research reliability.