• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.141-177
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• 2011

I. Research Objectives: Most of the previous studies on diffusion have concentrated on efficacy of WOM communication with the use of variables at individual level (Iacobucci 1996; Midgley et al. 1992). However, there is a paucity of studies which investigated network's structural properties as antecedents of WOM from the perspective of consumers' sociocultural propensities. Against this research backbone, this study attempted to link the network's structural properties and consumer' WOM behavior on cross-national basis. The major research objective of this study was to examine the relationship between network properties and WOM by comparing Korean and Chinese consumers. Specific objectives of this research are threefold; firstly, it sought to examine whether network properties (i.e., tie strength, centrality, range) affect WOM (WOM intention and quality of WOM). Secondly, it aimed to explore the moderating effects of cutural orientation (uncertainty avoidance and individuality) on the relationship between network properties and WOM. Thirdly, it substantiates the role of innovativeness as antecedents to both network properties and WOM. II. Research Hypotheses: Based on the above research objectives, the study put forth the following research hypotheses to validate. ${\cdot}$ H 1-1 : The Strength of tie between two counterparts within network will positively influence WOM effectivenes ${\cdot}$ H 1-2 : The network centrality will positively influence the WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 1-3 : The network range will positively influence the WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 2-1 : The consumer's uncertainty avoidance tendency will moderate the relationship between network properties and WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 2-2 : The consumer's individualism tendency will moderate the relationship between network properties and WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 3-1 : The consumer's innovativeness will positively influence the social network properties ${\cdot}$ H 3-2 : The consumer's innovativeness will positively influence WOM effectiveness III. Methodology: Through a pilot study and back-translation, two versions of questionnaire were prepared, one in Korean and the other in Chinese. The chinese data were collected from the chinese students enrolled in language schools in Suwon city in Korea, while Korean data were collected from students taking classes in a major university in Seoul. A total of 277 questionnaire were used for analysis of Korean data and 212 for Chinese data. The reason why Chinese students living in Korea rather than in China were selected was based on two factors: one was to neutralize the differences (ie, retail channel availability) that may arise from living in separate countries and the second was to minimize the difference in communication venues such as internet accessibility and cell phone usability. SPSS 12.0 and AMOS 7.0 were used for analysis. IV. Results: Prior to hypothesis verification, mean differences between the two countries in terms of major constructs were performed with the following result; As for network properties (tie strength, centrality and range), Koreans showed higher scores in all three constructs. For cultural orientation traits, Koreans scored higher only on uncertainty avoidance trait than Chinese. As a result of verifying the first research objective, confirming the relationship between network properties and WOM effectiveness, on Korean side, tie strength(Beta=.116; t=1.785) and centrality (Beta=.499; t=6.776) significantly influenced on WOM intention, and similar finding was obtained for Chinese side, with tie strength (Beta=.246; t=3.544) and centrality (Beta=.247; t=3.538) being significant. However, with regard to WOM argument quality, Korean data yielded only centrality (Beta=.82; t=7.600) having a significant impact on WOM, whereas China showed both tie strength(Beat=.142; t=2.052) and centrality(Beta=.348; t=5.031) being influential. To answer for the second research objective addressing the moderating role of cultural orientation, moderated regression anaylsis was performed and the result showed that uncertainty avoidance moderated between network range and WOM intention for both Korea and China, But for Korea, the uncertainty avoidance moderated between tie strength and WOM quality, while for China it moderated between network range and WOM intention. And innovativeness moderated between tie strength and WOM intention for Korea but it moderated between network range and WOM intention for China. As a result of analysing for third research objective, we found that for Korea, innovativeness positively influenced centrality only (Beta=.546; t=10.808), while for China it influenced both tie strength (Beta=.203; t=2.998) and centrality(Beta=.518; t=8.782). But for both countries alike, the innovativeness influenced positively on WOM (WOM intention and WOM quality). V. Implications: The study yields the two practical implications. Firstly, the result suggests that companies targeting multinational customers need to identify segments which are susceptible to the positive WOM and WOM information based on individual traits such as uncertainty avoidance and individualism and based on that, develop marketing communication strategy. Secondly, the companies need to divide the market on Roger's five innovation stages and based on this information, enforce marketing strategy which utilizes social networking tools such as public media and WOM. For instance, innovator and early adopters, if provided with new product information, will be able to capitalize upon the network advantages and thus add informational value to network operations using SNS or corporate blog.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.1-23
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• 2018

From the 21st century, various high-quality services have come up with the growth of the internet or 'Information and Communication Technologies'. Especially, the scale of E-commerce industry in which Amazon and E-bay are standing out is exploding in a large way. As E-commerce grows, Customers could get what they want to buy easily while comparing various products because more products have been registered at online shopping malls. However, a problem has arisen with the growth of E-commerce. As too many products have been registered, it has become difficult for customers to search what they really need in the flood of products. When customers search for desired products with a generalized keyword, too many products have come out as a result. On the contrary, few products have been searched if customers type in details of products because concrete product-attributes have been registered rarely. In this situation, recognizing texts in images automatically with a machine can be a solution. Because bulk of product details are written in catalogs as image format, most of product information are not searched with text inputs in the current text-based searching system. It means if information in images can be converted to text format, customers can search products with product-details, which make them shop more conveniently. There are various existing OCR(Optical Character Recognition) programs which can recognize texts in images. But existing OCR programs are hard to be applied to catalog because they have problems in recognizing texts in certain circumstances, like texts are not big enough or fonts are not consistent. Therefore, this research suggests the way to recognize keywords in catalog with the Deep Learning algorithm which is state of the art in image-recognition area from 2010s. Single Shot Multibox Detector(SSD), which is a credited model for object-detection performance, can be used with structures re-designed to take into account the difference of text from object. But there is an issue that SSD model needs a lot of labeled-train data to be trained, because of the characteristic of deep learning algorithms, that it should be trained by supervised-learning. To collect data, we can try labelling location and classification information to texts in catalog manually. But if data are collected manually, many problems would come up. Some keywords would be missed because human can make mistakes while labelling train data. And it becomes too time-consuming to collect train data considering the scale of data needed or costly if a lot of workers are hired to shorten the time. Furthermore, if some specific keywords are needed to be trained, searching images that have the words would be difficult, as well. To solve the data issue, this research developed a program which create train data automatically. This program can make images which have various keywords and pictures like catalog and save location-information of keywords at the same time. With this program, not only data can be collected efficiently, but also the performance of SSD model becomes better. The SSD model recorded 81.99% of recognition rate with 20,000 data created by the program. Moreover, this research had an efficiency test of SSD model according to data differences to analyze what feature of data exert influence upon the performance of recognizing texts in images. As a result, it is figured out that the number of labeled keywords, the addition of overlapped keyword label, the existence of keywords that is not labeled, the spaces among keywords and the differences of background images are related to the performance of SSD model. This test can lead performance improvement of SSD model or other text-recognizing machine based on deep learning algorithm with high-quality data. SSD model which is re-designed to recognize texts in images and the program developed for creating train data are expected to contribute to improvement of searching system in E-commerce. Suppliers can put less time to register keywords for products and customers can search products with product-details which is written on the catalog.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.1-17
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• 2012

This study was planned for an empirical review of foodservice operation in expressway rest areas for a menu strategy targeting staff and customers. The results were as follows. Main foodservice category included 10-30 items of Korean dishes. The needs for having branded foodservice menu in rest areas were high in fusion/fast foods, snack/ready-made and beverages. Employment of professional cooks in rest areas was low (10-30%), and the most important factor was 'taste' when cooking Korean foods. Foreigners preferred fusion/fast foods and snack/ready-made foods to Korean food, beverages and Japanese/Chinese foods, and most of the foreigners ordered food with 'no question'(55.5%) or 'some questions'(34.8%). Rest area staff prepared some photos/pictures of foods (80-100%) for menu comprehension, but the accuracy of menu transcription was very low. Customers used a rest area once or twice, stayed for 10-20 min(43.6%)/20-30 min(38.6%), visited by car(77.7%) to relax and use toilets(61.6%) on average. Favorite food and snacks were Korean(32.7%) and ready made/snacks(33.0%), and they spent 5,000-10,000 won(51.3%), 3,000-5,000 won(25.8%) on them. Customer satisfaction with rest areas was 'average' regardless of gender, age, education levels and jobs. With this analysis, we should prepare an efficient menu strategy for customer satisfaction and plans for analyzing problems along with alternatives.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.43-53
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• 2013

The paper addresses the introduction of outsourcing of delivery service for the small service industries such as delivery based restaurant in order to increase the profit and revenue of the service company, upgrade the delivery satisfaction for the customers, and expand the welfare of the senior people through the work. The chinese restaurants are selected as model service companies, outsourcing of delivery services are suggested for those restaurants and simulation models are developed for all operation systems for them. Some of input data for the simulation are collected from the real world and others are refined through the interview with the field workers. 6 scenarios are established considering the number of deliverers and delivery charges and simulation experiments for each scenario have been done according to the 3 kind of situations of the service companies. The results show that introduction of outsourcing increases the revenue and profit of the service company, decreases the service time for the customers and increases the revenue of the delivery outsourcing company employing the senior people. So delivery outsourcing for the service industries can be considered as a good solution for the welfare problem of the senior people.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.95-117
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• 2015

With the active smartphones user exceeding 500 million by the end of 2014, China has now become the largest smartphone market in the world. Smartphone companies provide variety of information through a range of applications, such as communications, entertainment, games, and so on. There were many studies conducted about the user acceptance and continuous intention of mobile service. However, it is still not quite clear what factors attract people to reuse smartphone in China. This paper examines the continuous intention of smartphone about Chinese customers. This study incorporates perceived enjoyment as a additional construct into a extended TAM model, by integrating a hedonic service of smartphone. We propose a research model that reflects the individual characteristics and usage contexts of smartphone, such as innovativeness, social influence, and service quality, and analyze the structural relationship between the main variables through empirical study. This study empirically investigated a research model and conducted a survey of smartphone service users in China. Our study proved that perceived enjoyment has a positive influence on continuous intention to use smartphone services. This paper provides the managers an insight that smartphone companies should take more consideration on how to provide more enjoyable service and attract customers to reuse their services.

• Journal of the East Asian Society of Dietary Life
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.482-493
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• 2003

This study has been designed to stress the thoughts that soups should be offered taking into account customer's preference aimed at leading to eventual customer's satisfaction and the importance that Korean traditional food should take the lead in shifting dining-out industry's paradigm to customer-orientation instead of product-orientation. From August 15 through August 30, 2003, the drawn-up questionnaires were handed out to 500 numbers of adults aged over 20 living in Seoul, metropolitan city of Korea and the finally collected 361 questionnaires from them have been analysed as a subject for this study. It showed that the male respondents(44%) dined out much more frequently than the female respondents(35%) and their rate of 5,000-7,000 Won for a meal was most preferred as their average expenditure at one sitting in the restaurant. When eating Korean food at home or in a restaurant, the majority(5l,3%) of them think the soups(Tang) should be served coupled with their ordered meals. Among soups using flesh and meat as a staple material, they most preferred beef & bone soup(33.2%), followed by beep rib soup(30.4%) and beef soup with seasoned red pepper(l0.8%), and among soups using fish & shell and crustacean as a staple material, most preferred were hot fish soup(20.6%), loach soup(l5.2%) and hot crab soup(11.4%). Among soups using beans as a staple material, they most preferred soybean paste stew(33.2%), uncurdled soybean curd stew(29.4%) and Dambuk stew(l5.8%). Among soups using fowls and birds as a staple material, chicken soup with ginseng(51.9%), plain chicken soup(l8.4%) and chicken soup with red pepper sauce(l2.3%) falls on the most preferred. Among soups using vegetables and seaweeds as a staple material, most preferred are sea mustard soup(25.3%), Kimchi soup(16.8%), soybean paste soup with Chinese cabbage(13.0%) and bean sprout soup(10.1%). The soups(Tang) most preferred in the morning time are those soups whose staple materials are vegetables and seaweeds, such as sea mustard soup, bean sprout soup, Kimchi soup and soybean paste soup with Chinese cabbage while the soups most preferred for the lunch time are beef & bone soup, beep rib soup, chicken soup with ginseng and beef soup with seasoned red pepper while beef soup with seasoned red pepper, beef & bone soup, soybean curd stew and Kimchi soup are most preferred soups for the dinner time. The survey showed that 41 % of the subject preferred chicken soup with ginseng for a food considered good by themselves for their health. The male respondents preferred Bosin-tang(soup of edible-dog meat) than the female counterparts did, while the female respondents preferred chicken soup with ginseng than the male counterparts did. The survey showed that when eating korean traditional food, 70% of the subject are visiting a restaurant where soups are cooked delicious while 61% of the subject think that price does not matter if only food tastes good, which is reflecting that taste of food is a decisive factor in selecting menu rather than its price is. In conclusion, you can say that taste of soup is the most important factor creating steady customer in the restaurant, taking it into account Korean people most prefer their traditional food when dining out.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.51-65
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• 2010

This study attempts to examine how the perception of risk and customer satisfaction influence the intention to recommend when selecting a Korean restaurant. 257 copies of the questionnaire for the Chinese students studying in Daegu and Gyeongsangbuk-do are analyzed. Three hypotheses were established and the results are as follows. First, as a result of difference analysis about perception of risk depending on dining types, there are significant differences in all factors of preception of risk partially. Second, as a result of difference analysis of customer behavior depending on dining types, there are significant differences between revisit intention and recommendation intention, and dining motivation and preferred Korean menu. Third, the effects of 6 factors of perception of risk on customer behavior are analyzed, and there are decreased customer satisfaction as the customers perceive financial and psychological crisis highly.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.377-388
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• 2016

The purposes of this study are; first, to supply useful suggestions for the market segmentation of the Chinese market according to individual psychological variables(self-congruence) of customers. Second, it figures out the relative importance of actual self-congruence and ideal self-congruence. Lastly, it reveals whether there are any differences in the preference of attributes according to the popular cultural involvement. According to the results, actual self-congruence had a positive influence on the contents factor evaluation while ideal self-congruence had positive effect on the human and cultural factors evaluation. Also, the human and cultural factor had a positive influence on the purchase intention, as well as content factor and cultural factor had the influence on the word-of-mouth. In addition, the group of highly interested in the involvement at the popular culture was significantly higher in the evaluation on the human and contents factor than the low group.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.127-137
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• 2017

The role of smartphones is changing from a communication system for exchanging calls and information into a universal platform for cultural services. Also, satisfaction for mobile application services on smartphones is a very important factor in the smart business. In This paper, we analyze the effects of the outcome, service scape, costs, and especially the impact of whether costumers having to pay or free for the app on customer satisfaction. For this purpose, we analyzed survey data on service quality of mobile app service from Chinese mobile app service users. We also analyzed the moderating effects of paid and free mobile app services. As a result, it was confirmed that the quality, servicescape quality and cost of mobile app service that customers perceive have a positive effect on customer satisfaction. In addition, the effect of the cost of mobile app service perceived by the customer on customer satisfaction showed that free mobile app service was more significant than paid mobile app service. This paper can be used as an alternative to monetization for providing a mobile app service provider or a mobile app service provider who wants to switch mobile app service from free to paid service.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.9-21
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• 2020

The Gross Merchandise Volume for the China's Singles day event in 2019 is about $38.4 billion. More than 500 million customers placed about 1.3 billion orders a day, and the related delivery volume is 2.8 billion. The main technologies associated with the 4^th Industrial Revolution are bringing about a big change in the logistics industry. The purpose of this study is to present implications by reviewing the main technologies which are applied to China's Singles day event, the introduction of smart logistics in China, and analyzing the progress of Singles day, smart system of Alibaba, its significance. China still has poor infrastructure in non-capital areas. And many Chinese companies are actively introducing and developing smart logistics to cover the vast continental area of China. Singles Day is a representative case in point where the smart logistics and main technologies related to 4^th Industrial Revolution are applied. The data obtained through smart logistics would be reused for inventory management, production planning, and order processing, contributing to the optimization of the company's operations. In the era of the 4^th Industrial Revolution, domestic companies and governments need to make efforts to expand the introduction of smart logistics to secure competitiveness with global advanced companies.