• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.14 no.3
• /
• pp.361-370
• /
• 2011

We explore the priority between product attributes such as aesthetics and usability in consumer decision-making. In the recent study in Germany, consumers preferred a visually beautiful product but discounted the value of aesthetics in actual product choice (Diefenbach & Hassenzahl, 2009). In contrast to the individualistic culture which values personal needs(e.g., Germany), recognition from other members has great importance in the collectivistic culture (e.g., Korea). We propose that Korean consumers weigh greater value on the attribute easily perceived from the product appearance (i.e., aesthetics). We replicated the procedure of the study conducted in Germany. As expected, participants highly valued aesthetics rather than usability in product choice. As for aesthetics, participants were likely to choose an expensive but beautiful product; on the contrary a less expensive and less usable product were likely to be chosen as for usability (Study 1). Moreover, usability was sacrificed for aesthetics in the trade-off condition (Study 2). The participants who chose the beautiful product reported higher social recognition desire whereas no difference was shown with respect to usability.

• Journal of the Korean Association of Geographic Information Studies
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.194-205
• /
• 2006

The purpose of this study is to develop a pedestrian multi-agent model and simulation system using multi-agent theory, which may be utilized as a planning support system for building a comfort and safe environment of pedestrian street. Differing from existing pedestrian models, however, every single pedestrian was regarded as an individual agent in the model. Multiple agents like multiple pedestrians in the street then maintain their own characteristics and respond to surrounding environment. In addition their moving behavior are made by their own decision rules that they have or had acquired through the interactive communications or learning between agents like real world. After verifying the model validation, as the $R^2$ between the predicted value and observed value was up to 0.781, the developed model was applied to Gazwa district within Gyeongsang university village. The simulation system was developed by Flash MX action scripts and the physical environment of the streets was configured with the digital map and ArcGis within computer virtual space. The attribute data of buildings such as type and size of commercial business were collected through the field survey and combined with physical features. Then the effect of the variation of building attractiveness and the occurrence of street events to pedestrian environment were simulated. Through the experiments this study could make suggestions to improve pedestrian environment.

• Journal of Forest and Environmental Science
• /
• v.15 no.1
• /
• pp.1-9
• /
• 1999

Noticing the intrinsic growing habit variations of hardwood species which is indigenous to the natural deciduous forest, eighteen tree species in overstory were selected for comparative evaluating tree form so as to develop the tree form index (TFI). Selected six tree form attributes were arbitrarily divided four assessment criteria and given appropriate scores. Eighteen tree species were undergone corresponding scores, converted to percentage base, and estimated TFI by the summation of the six scoring values. Cluster analysis was carried out to review which attribute would have been shared among species based on dissimilarity of scores for each pair of species in $18{\times}6$ data matrix. The result showed that Populus davidiana had the highest TFI value of 80.8 and Carpinus cordata had the lowest TFI va1ue of 46.3. The species which received more than 70 of TFI are Populus davidiana, Betula costata, Fraxinus mandshurica, and Ulmus davidiana var. japonica, characterized by the advantage of straight and longer bole, the narrower crown, and the thinner branch. On the contrary, such species as Sorbus alnifolia. Prunus sargentii, Acer mandshuricum, Juglans mandshurica, and Carpinus cordata received less than 60 of TFI, characterized by the disadvantage of the crooked or forked stem. the wider or deeper crown. and the thicker branch. In the dendrogram produced by cluster analysis, arbitrary value of Euclidean distance 10 divided eighteen species into four distinctive groups. and the typical characteristics of each group were discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems
• /
• v.26 no.5
• /
• pp.375-382
• /
• 2016

In this paper, we presents a signatures verification by using the nonlinear quantization histogram of polar coordinate based on multi-dimensional adjacent pixel intensity difference. The multi-dimensional adjacent pixel intensity difference is calculated from an intensity difference between a pair of pixels in a horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and opposite diagonal directions centering around the reference pixel. The polar coordinate is converted from the rectangular coordinate by making a pair of horizontal and vertical difference, and diagonal and opposite diagonal difference, respectively. The nonlinear quantization histogram is also calculated from nonuniformly quantizing the polar coordinate value by using the Lloyd algorithm, which is the recursive method. The polar coordinate histogram of 4-directional intensity difference is applied not only for more considering the corelation between pixels but also for reducing the calculation load by decreasing the number of histogram. The nonlinear quantization is also applied not only to still more reflect an attribute of intensity variations between pixels but also to obtain the low level histogram. The proposed method has been applied to verified 90(3 persons * 30 signatures/person) images of 256*256 pixels based on a matching measures of city-block, Euclidean, ordinal value, and normalized cross-correlation coefficient. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a superior to the linear quantization histogram, and Euclidean distance is also the optimal matching measure.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
• /
• v.34 no.7
• /
• pp.1028-1034
• /
• 2005

The purposes of this study were to: (a) identify students' patronage behaviors on university foodservice, (b) evaluate customers' perception and detect complaints on food service quality, and (c) recommend new design of food service operation by identifying relative importance of university foodservice attributes. The questionnaire was developed and distributed to 400 undergraduates. Statistical data analysis was completed using SPSS/Win 12.0 for descriptive analysis and conjoint analysis. The results of this study were summarized as follows: Students were patronizing university foodservice 3.4 times per week because of 'a short distance', 'a low price' and 'speedy meals' and evaluated overall satisfaction and value as low level. Customers were dissatisfied with eight among twelve food service attributes including handling customer's complain ASAP, According to conjoint analysis, price $(37\%)$ was considered as the most important factor and atmosphere $(30\%),\;food\;(22\%)$ and distance $(11\%)$ were the next factors. Profile 2, which had 4 attributes of a location within 6-10 min, comfortable circumstances, a meal served with 4 side-dish and dessert and a meal price of \2,000 firstly, were recommend as new food service operation model.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.41 no.1
• /
• pp.51-59
• /
• 2013

This study was conducted to compare the sizes of effective values, which users recognize, according to the kinds of physical and psychological services provided by an arboretum, by estimating them in monetary values. As an analysis tool for this purpose, the CE(Choice Experiments) method, which is able to estimate effective value's size depending on each variable, was employed. For drawing up profiles for estimation of the values of individual services, 25 profiles were extracted using the orthogonal design of the SPSS statistical package, and questions of 75 pairs were created not to make each of the profiles overlapped. Then, each user was given three questions at five sets each and 3,510 data were used for the analysis. As the result, in relation to the attribute, 'The kinds of trees should be diversified 50% more than now.', firstly, users showed the biggest willingness to pay, based on the present level, and expressed intentions to pay 7,956 won, additionally. Secondly, the value of the path design that was unique than the present road design was estimated in 6,025 won, and when individual attendants guided visitors in the arboretum, they expressed intentions to pay nearly three times more expenses than when they were guided as a group. These results show that users in the Gyeongnam Arboretum recognized the highest effective values towards the collection and display of trees that are arboretum's original functions, and it was followed by the unique road design to observe a variety of dense trees well. This research could be useful in comparing or measuring particular effective values of users that central operators of arboretums want to know. Moreover, it would be suggested as an advanced research for providing basic data about value estimation of individual environmental goods not only in arboretums, but also in other fields.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.51-67
• /
• 2009

Developing an agile recommender system for nomadic users has been regarded as a promising application in mobile and ubiquitous settings. To increase the quality of personalized recommendation in terms of accuracy and elapsed time, estimating future context of the user in a correct way is highly crucial. Traditionally, time series analysis and Makovian process have been adopted for such forecasting. However, these methods are not adequate in predicting context data, only because most of context data are represented as nominal scale. To resolve these limitations, the alignment-prediction algorithm has been suggested for context prediction, especially for future context from the low-level context. Recently, an ontological approach has been proposed for guided context prediction without context history. However, due to variety of context information, acquiring sufficient context prediction knowledge a priori is not easy in most of service domains. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to propose a novel context prediction methodology, which does not require a priori knowledge, and to increase accuracy and decrease elapsed time for service response. To do so, we have newly developed pattern-based context prediction approach. First of ail, a set of individual rules is derived from each context attribute using context history. Then a pattern consisted of results from reasoning individual rules, is developed for pattern learning. If at least one context property matches, say R, then regard the pattern as right. If the pattern is new, add right pattern, set the value of mismatched properties = 0, freq = 1 and w(R, 1). Otherwise, increase the frequency of the matched right pattern by 1 and then set w(R,freq). After finishing training, if the frequency is greater than a threshold value, then save the right pattern in knowledge base. On the other hand, if at least one context property matches, say W, then regard the pattern as wrong. If the pattern is new, modify the result into wrong answer, add right pattern, and set frequency to 1 and w(W, 1). Or, increase the matched wrong pattern's frequency by 1 and then set w(W, freq). After finishing training, if the frequency value is greater than a threshold level, then save the wrong pattern on the knowledge basis. Then, context prediction is performed with combinatorial rules as follows: first, identify current context. Second, find matched patterns from right patterns. If there is no pattern matched, then find a matching pattern from wrong patterns. If a matching pattern is not found, then choose one context property whose predictability is higher than that of any other properties. To show the feasibility of the methodology proposed in this paper, we collected actual context history from the travelers who had visited the largest amusement park in Korea. As a result, 400 context records were collected in 2009. Then we randomly selected 70% of the records as training data. The rest were selected as testing data. To examine the performance of the methodology, prediction accuracy and elapsed time were chosen as measures. We compared the performance with case-based reasoning and voting methods. Through a simulation test, we conclude that our methodology is clearly better than CBR and voting methods in terms of accuracy and elapsed time. This shows that the methodology is relatively valid and scalable. As a second round of the experiment, we compared a full model to a partial model. A full model indicates that right and wrong patterns are used for reasoning the future context. On the other hand, a partial model means that the reasoning is performed only with right patterns, which is generally adopted in the legacy alignment-prediction method. It turned out that a full model is better than a partial model in terms of the accuracy while partial model is better when considering elapsed time. As a last experiment, we took into our consideration potential privacy problems that might arise among the users. To mediate such concern, we excluded such context properties as date of tour and user profiles such as gender and age. The outcome shows that preserving privacy is endurable. Contributions of this paper are as follows: First, academically, we have improved sequential matching methods to predict accuracy and service time by considering individual rules of each context property and learning from wrong patterns. Second, the proposed method is found to be quite effective for privacy preserving applications, which are frequently required by B2C context-aware services; the privacy preserving system applying the proposed method successfully can also decrease elapsed time. Hence, the method is very practical in establishing privacy preserving context-aware services. Our future research issues taking into account some limitations in this paper can be summarized as follows. First, user acceptance or usability will be tested with actual users in order to prove the value of the prototype system. Second, we will apply the proposed method to more general application domains as this paper focused on tourism in amusement park.

• Journal of Distribution Research
• /
• v.15 no.3
• /
• pp.111-137
• /
• 2010

The basic purpose of this study is to investigate perceived quality and service personal value affecting the result of long-term relationship between service buyers and suppliers. This research presented a constructive model(perceived quality affecting the service personal value and the moderate effect of NFC) in the on off line and then propose the research model base on prior researches and studies about relationships among components of service. Data were gathered from respondents who visit at the education service market. For this study, Data were analyzed by AMOS 7.0. We integrate the literature on services marketing with researches on personal values and perceived quality. The SERPVAL scale presented here allows for the creation of a common ground for assessing service personal values, giving a clear understanding of the key value dimensions behind service choice and usage. It will lead to a focus of future research in services marketing, extending knowledge in the field and stimulating further empirical research on service personal values. At the managerial level, as a tool the SERPVAL scale should allow practitioners to evaluate and improve the value of a service, and consequently, to define strategies and actions to address services for customers based on their fundamental personal values. Through qualitative and empirical research, we find that the service quality construct conforms to the structure of a second-order factor model that ties service quality perceptions to distinct and actionable dimensions: outcome, interaction, and environmental quality. In turn, each has two subdimensions that define the basis of service quality perceptions. The authors further suggest that for each of these subdimensions to contribute to improved service quality perceptions, the quality received by consumers must be perceived to be reliable, responsive, and empathetic. Although the service personal value may be found in researches that explore individual values and their consequences for consumer behavior, there is no established operationalization of a SERPVAL scale. The inexistence of an established scale, duly adapted in order to understand and analyze personal values behind services usage, exposes the need of a measurement scale with such a purpose. This need has to be rooted, however, in a conceptualization of the construct being scaled. Service personal values can be defined as a customer's overall assessment of the use of a service based on the perception of what is achieved in terms of his own personal values. As consumer behaviors serve to show an individual's values, the use of a service can also be a way to fulfill and demonstrate consumers'personal values. In this sense, a service can provide more to the customer than its concrete and abstract attributes at both the attribute and the quality levels, and more than its functional consequences at the value level. Both values and services literatures agree, that personal value is the highest-level concept, followed by instrumental values, attitudes and finally by product attributes. Purchasing behaviors are agreed to be the end result of these concepts' interaction, with personal values taking a major role in the final decision process. From both consumers' and practitioners' perspectives, values are extremely relevant, as they are desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people's lives. While building on previous research, we propose to assess service personal values through three broad groups of individual dimensions; at the self-oriented level, we use (1) service value to peaceful life (SVPL) and, at the social-oriented level, we use (2) service value to social recognition (SVSR), and (3) service value to social integration (SVSI). Service value to peaceful life is our first dimension. This dimension emerged as a combination of values coming from the RVS scale, a scale built specifically to assess general individual values. If a service promotes a pleasurable life, brings or improves tranquility, safety and harmony, then its user recognizes the value of this service. Generally, this service can improve the user's pleasure of life, since it protects or defends the consumer from threats to life or pressures on it. While building upon both the LOV scale, a scale built specifically to assess consumer values, and the RVS scale for individual values, we develop the other two dimensions: SVSR and SVSI. The roles of social recognition and social integration to improve service personal value have been seriously neglected. Social recognition derives its outcome utility from its predictive utility. When applying this underlying belief to our second dimension, SVSR, we assume that people use a service while taking into consideration the content of what is delivered. Individuals consider whether the service aids in gaining respect from others, social recognition and status, as well as whether it allows achieving a more fulfilled and stimulating life, which might then be revealed to others. People also tend to engage in behavior that receives social recognition and to avoid behavior that leads to social disapproval, and this contributes to an individual's social integration. This leads us to the third dimension, SVSI, which is based on the fact that if the consumer perceives that a service strengthens friendships, provides the possibility of becoming more integrated in the group, or promotes better relationships at the social, professional or family levels, then the service will contribute to social integration, and naturally the individual will recognize personal value in the service. Most of the research in business values deals with individual values. However, to our knowledge, no study has dealt with assessing overall personal values as well as their dimensions in a service context. Our final results show that the scales adapted from the Schwartz list were excluded. A possible explanation is that although Schwartz builds on Rokeach work in order to explore individual values, its dimensions might be especially focused on analyzing societal values. As we are looking for individual dimensions, this might explain why the values inspired by the Schwartz list were excluded from the model. The hierarchical structure of the final scale presented in this paper also presents theoretical implications. Although we cannot claim to definitively capture the dimensions of service personal values, we believe that we come close to capturing these overall evaluations because the second-order factor extracts the underlying commonality among dimensions. In addition to obtaining respondents' evaluations of the dimensions, the second-order factor model captures the common variance among these dimensions, reflecting the respondents' overall assessment of service personal values. Towards this fact, we expect that the service personal values conceptualization and measurement scale presented here contributes to both business values literature and the service marketing field, allowing for the delineation of strategies for adding value to services. This new scale also presents managerial implications. The SERPVAL dimensions give some guidance on how to better pursue a highly service-oriented business strategy. Indeed, the SERPVAL scale can be used for benchmarking purposes, as this scale can be used to identify whether or not a firms' marketing strategies are consistent with consumers' expectations. Managerial assessment of the personal values of a service might be extremely important because it allows managers to better understand what customers want or value. Thus, this scale allows us to identify what services are really valuable to the final consumer; providing knowledge for making choices regarding which services to include. Traditional approaches have focused their attention on service attributes (as quality) and service consequences(as service value), but personal values may be an important set of variables to be considered in understanding what attracts consumers to a certain service. By using the SERPVAL scale to assess the personal values associated with a services usage, managers may better understand the reasons behind services' usage, so that they may handle them more efficiently. While testing nomological validity, our empirical findings demonstrate that the three SERPVAL dimensions are positively and significantly associated with satisfaction. Additionally, while service value to social integration is related only with loyalty, service value to peaceful life is associated with both loyalty and repurchase intent. It is also interesting and surprising that service value to social recognition appears not to be significantly linked with loyalty and repurchase intent. A possible explanation is that no mobile service provider has yet emerged in the market as a luxury provider. All of the Portuguese providers are still trying to capture market share by means of low-end pricing. This research has implications for consumers as well. As more companies seek to build relationships with their customers, consumers are easily able to examine whether these relationships provide real value or not to their own lives. The selection of a strategy for a particular service depends on its customers' personal values. Being highly customer-oriented means having a strong commitment to customers, trying to create customer value and understanding customer needs. Enhancing service distinctiveness in order to provide a peaceful life, increase social recognition and gain a better social integration are all possible strategies that companies may pursue, but the one to pursue depends on the outstanding personal values held by the service customers. Data were gathered from 284 respondents in the korean discount store and online shopping mall market. This research proposed 3 hypotheses on 6 latent variables and tested through structural equation modeling. 6 alternative measurements were compared through statistical significance test of the 6 paths of research model and the overall fitting level of structural equation model. and the result was successful. and Perceived quality more positively influences service personal value when NFC is high than when no NFC is low in the off-line market. The results of the study indicate that service quality is properly modeled as an antecedent of service personal value. We consider the research and managerial implications of the study and its limitations. In sum, by knowing the dimensions a consumer takes into account when choosing a service, a better understanding of purchasing behaviors may be realized, guiding managers toward customers expectations. By defining strategies and actions that address potential problems with the service personal values, managers might ultimately influence their firm's performance. we expect to contribute to both business values and service marketing literatures through the development of the service personal value. At a time when marketing researchers are challenged to provide research with practical implications, it is also believed that this framework may be used by managers to pursue service-oriented business strategies while taking into consideration what customers value.

• Management & Information Systems Review
• /
• v.35 no.3
• /
• pp.57-79
• /
• 2016

It is required to derive various conclusions by identifying the type of power and the relationship between SCMs and presenting practical implications. Thus, we can identify the differential effects of each type of power on SCM performance. We can contribute to develop the practical implications at more sophisticated multi-dimension by comparing results of this study with various SCM theories. Through previous studies, the source of power is largely divided into binding power and non-binding power. Binding power is classified into behavior coercion, binding reward and relationship legitimacy. Non-binding power is classified into work expertise, information superiority and value compliance. Enterprises should fully understand and recognize partners within supply chains including understanding of the source of power, imbalance and results. Thus, we look into types of power and effects on trust and commitment, and identify a causal relationship leading to collaboration and SCM performance. Specific research results are as follows. First, the binding power did not give a significant effect to the trust. However, the binding power gave a positively(+) significant effect to the commitment. Second, non-binding power showed a significant effect on both trust and commitment. As a result of analysis on total effects, it was shown that non-binding power gave indirect effects to collaboration and SCM performance. Third, it was shown that both trust and commitment significantly affected collaboration. From the perspectives of social exchange theory and trading cost theory among inter-organizational relationship theory, it may lead to SCM performance of trust, commitment and collaboration. Moreover, it was found that association of each attribute of power led to the significant result. Fourth, it was shown that trust and collaboration significantly affected SCM performance. However, commitment did not directly affect SCM performance, but it indirectly significantly affected SCM performance through collaboration. Proper use of this power can firmly build partnerships between members of the supply chain and induce the improvement on supply chain performance and satisfaction of members.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.20 no.3
• /
• pp.191-204
• /
• 2010

Recently, the CO2 emission and energy consumption have become critical global issues to decide the future of nations. Especially, the spread of IT products and the increased use of internet and web applications result in the energy consumption and CO2 emission of IT industry though information technologies drive global economic growth. EU, the United States, Japan and other developed countries are using IT related environmental regulations such as WEEE(Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), RoHS(Restriction of the use of Certain Hazardous Substance), REACH(Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of CHemicals) and EuP(Energy using Product), and have established systematic green business/IT strategies to enhance the competitiveness of IT industry. For example, the Japan government proposed the "Green IT initiative" for being compatible with economic growth and environmental protection. Not only energy saving technologies but energy saving systems have been developed for accomplishing sustainable development. Korea's CO2 emission and energy consumption continuously have grown at comparatively high rates. They are related to its industrial structure depending on high energy-consuming industries such as iron and steel Industry, automotive industry, shipbuilding industry, semiconductor industry, and so on. In particular, export proportion of IT manufacturing is quite high in Korea. For example, the global market share of the semiconductor such as DRAM was about 80% in 2008. Accordingly, Korea needs to establish a systematic strategy to respond to the global environmental regulations and to maintain competitiveness in the IT industry. However, green competitiveness of Korea ranked 11th among 15 major countries and R&D budget for green technology is not large enough to develop energy-saving technologies for infrastructure and value chain of low-carbon society though that grows at high rates. Moreover, there are no concrete action plans in Korea. This research aims to deduce the priorities of the Korean green business/IT strategies to use multi attribute weighted average method. We selected a panel of 19 experts who work at the green business related firms such as HP, IBM, Fujitsu and so on, and selected six assessment indices such as the urgency of the technology development, the technology gap between Korea and the developed countries, the effect of import substitution, the spillover effect of technology, the market growth, and the export potential of the package or stand-alone products by existing literature review. We submitted questionnaires at approximately weekly intervals to them for priorities of the green business/IT strategies. The strategies broadly classify as follows. The first strategy which consists of the green business/IT policy and standardization, process and performance management and IT industry and legislative alignment relates to government's role in the green economy. The second strategy relates to IT to support environment sustainability such as the travel and ways of working management, printer output and recycling, intelligent building, printer rationalization and collaboration and connectivity. The last strategy relates to green IT systems, services and usage such as the data center consolidation and energy management, hardware recycle decommission, server and storage virtualization, device power management, and service supplier management. All the questionnaires were assessed via a five-point Likert scale ranging from "very little" to "very large." Our findings show that the IT to support environment sustainability is prior to the other strategies. In detail, the green business /IT policy and standardization is the most important in the government's role. The strategies of intelligent building and the travel and ways of working management are prior to the others for supporting environment sustainability. Finally, the strategies for the data center consolidation and energy management and server and storage virtualization have the huge influence for green IT systems, services and usage This research results the following implications. The amount of energy consumption and CO2 emissions of IT equipment including electrical business equipment will need to be clearly indicated in order to manage the effect of green business/IT strategy. And it is necessary to develop tools that measure the performance of green business/IT by each step. Additionally, intelligent building could grow up in energy-saving, growth of low carbon and related industries together. It is necessary to expand the affect of virtualization though adjusting and controlling the relationship between the management teams.