• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.105-117
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• 2019

Purpose - Underdog positioning is often used to evoke a positive attitude when interacting with consumers. However, little research has been conducted on the market competition structure and innovation contexts in which underdog positioning produces the most impact. This research aims to investigate unexplored boundary conditions of underdog positioning and addresses two issues: market structures (oligopoly vs monopolistic competition) and perceived firm innovativeness (PFI). Design/methodology - Two one-way ANOVA designs (market structures: monopolistic competitions vs. oligopoly; perceived frim innovativeness: strong vs. weak) were randomly assigned to 297 graduate and undergraduate students (52 % female) majoring in business. Study 1 examined the effect of underdog positioning on consumer attitudes in the different market structures. Study 2 investigated the relationship between underdog effect and consumer attitudes through viewing conditions that varied in PFI. Findings - Drawing on the results of the study, the authors conclude that underdog positioning is effective to generate more positive consumer attitudes when employed in the market structure of monopolistic competition rather than oligopoly. Moreover, both underdog and top dog positioning are likely to generate more positive consumer attitudes when accompanied with strong PFI than weak PFI. Originality/value -This is the first study to distinguish between monopolistic competition and oligopoly market structures with underdog positioning as well as to demonstrate a positive effect of PFI, regardless of the type of brand narratives.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.67-75
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• 2023

Purpose: The study is focused on understanding consumer behaviour related to credit card use in retail payment or identifying factors that influence risk perception. Research design, data and methodology: Based on data collecting from structured self-administered questionnaires of 247 Vietnamese bank account payers, this study uses the Cronbach alpha analysis, the factor analyses, the structural equation modeling to assess the research's measurement model and structural model with the presence of knowledge, propensity to trust, self-efficacy, risk perception, intended use and their complex, intertwined relationships. Results: The results reveal that customer's perceived risk, which is affected by their self-efficacy and propensity to trust, negatively impact on their intended use of credit cards in retail payment. However, there is no evidence of the significant influence of consumer knowledge on how they assess potential losses of credit card. Conclusions: These findings provide a better understanding of consumer risk perception, its antecedents and consequence in a direction of credit card adoption. Bank managers or marketers should focus on increasing the information about credit cards and issues related to credit card use in retail payment, promoting mechanisms to encourage customers to participate in the credit card experience.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.570-583
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• 2020

The fashion industry is accountable for labor and environment-related issues. With such issues raised, consumers' social responsibility for environmental and labor issues has become an important factor that shapes the perception of companies. This study investigates the relationship between consumer values, concerns regarding social issues, and willingness to pay a premium for ethical fashion products. This study included two exogenous variables of altruistic value and egocentric value. In the conceptual model, consumers' social responsibility was conceptualized as two constructs of environmental consciousness and labor-issue consciousness. It was then analyzed as mediating variables. Willingness to pay a premium for ethical fashion products was the endogenous variable. Data was collected and analyzed with PLS-SEM from 600 consumers. The assessment of discriminant validity and construct validity using CFA were conducted before analyzing the model. Structural equation modeling results revealed that altruistic value directly influenced environmental consciousness and labor-issue consciousness. However, egocentric value was directly and significantly influenced only by labor-issue consciousness. Both environmental and labor issue consciousness directly influenced customers' willingness to pay a premium, but did not significantly change their willingness to pay a premium. Two-stage serial mediation analysis results indicated that the constructs did not have a significant mediation effect on the exogenous variables (altruistic value and egocentric value) and the endogenous variable (willingness to pay a premium) for ethical fashion products. This study found the influence of consumer's personal values on their willingness to pay a higher price for ethical fashion products.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers A
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.616-623
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• 2003

Competition among electric generation companies is a major goal of restructuring in the electricity industry, The trading system in an electricity market has been one of the most important issues in deregulated electricity market. This paper deals with comparisons of the major two types of the trading system: compulsory pool market and bilateral contract market. The two trading systems are compared quantitatively from the viewpoint of consumer's surplus and social welfare, This paper, also, proposes a unified model of Cournot and Bertrand for analyzing the mixed trading system of pool market and bilateral contract market. Nash equilibrium of the unified model is derived by criteria for participating in bilateral contract market. Numerical results from a sample case show that a mixed trading system of pool market and price-competitive bilateral market is beneficial to consumer from the view points of consumer's surplus.

• Korean Journal of Organic Agriculture
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.59-68
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• 2020

This study analyzed and suggested management situations and improving issues on a consumer cooperatives which has supplied environmentally friendly agricultural products from the year 2002. Indices of management analysis are stability ratio, activity ratio and profitability ratio. Management Stability ratio indices are debt ratio, net worth ratio, fixed ratio and current ratio. Management activity ratio ones include fixed assets turnover and net worth turnover. And profitability ratio is showed through return on investment, net return on sales and return on equity. In order to analyze these indices, financial statements after the closing entires are used each year.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.1-27
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• 2017

It is known that the economic sentiment index and macroeconomic indicators are closely related because economic agent's judgment and forecast of the business conditions affect economic fluctuations. For this reason, consumer sentiment or confidence provides steady fodder for business and is treated as an important piece of economic information. In Korea, private consumption accounts and consumer sentiment index highly relevant for both, which is a very important economic indicator for evaluating and forecasting the domestic economic situation. However, despite offering relevant insights into private consumption and GDP, the traditional approach to measuring the consumer confidence based on the survey has several limits. One possible weakness is that it takes considerable time to research, collect, and aggregate the data. If certain urgent issues arise, timely information will not be announced until the end of each month. In addition, the survey only contains information derived from questionnaire items, which means it can be difficult to catch up to the direct effects of newly arising issues. The survey also faces potential declines in response rates and erroneous responses. Therefore, it is necessary to find a way to complement it. For this purpose, we construct and assess an index designed to measure consumer economic sentiment index using sentiment analysis. Unlike the survey-based measures, our index relies on textual analysis to extract sentiment from economic and financial news articles. In particular, text data such as news articles and SNS are timely and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. There exist two main approaches to the automatic extraction of sentiment from a text, we apply the lexicon-based approach, using sentiment lexicon dictionaries of words annotated with the semantic orientations. In creating the sentiment lexicon dictionaries, we enter the semantic orientation of individual words manually, though we do not attempt a full linguistic analysis (one that involves analysis of word senses or argument structure); this is the limitation of our research and further work in that direction remains possible. In this study, we generate a time series index of economic sentiment in the news. The construction of the index consists of three broad steps: (1) Collecting a large corpus of economic news articles on the web, (2) Applying lexicon-based methods for sentiment analysis of each article to score the article in terms of sentiment orientation (positive, negative and neutral), and (3) Constructing an economic sentiment index of consumers by aggregating monthly time series for each sentiment word. In line with existing scholarly assessments of the relationship between the consumer confidence index and macroeconomic indicators, any new index should be assessed for its usefulness. We examine the new index's usefulness by comparing other economic indicators to the CSI. To check the usefulness of the newly index based on sentiment analysis, trend and cross - correlation analysis are carried out to analyze the relations and lagged structure. Finally, we analyze the forecasting power using the one step ahead of out of sample prediction. As a result, the news sentiment index correlates strongly with related contemporaneous key indicators in almost all experiments. We also find that news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity in most cases. In almost all experiments, the news sentiment index strongly correlates with related contemporaneous key indicators. Furthermore, in most cases, news sentiment shocks predict future economic activity; in head-to-head comparisons, the news sentiment measures outperform survey-based sentiment index as CSI. Policy makers want to understand consumer or public opinions about existing or proposed policies. Such opinions enable relevant government decision-makers to respond quickly to monitor various web media, SNS, or news articles. Textual data, such as news articles and social networks (Twitter, Facebook and blogs) are generated at high-speeds and cover a wide range of issues; because such sources can quickly capture the economic impact of specific economic issues, they have great potential as economic indicators. Although research using unstructured data in economic analysis is in its early stages, but the utilization of data is expected to greatly increase once its usefulness is confirmed.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.1-16
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• 2004

The purpose of this study was to examine the self-regulation in E-commerce business and review the major issues of self-regulation in several countries. This paper reviewed the legislation for the self regulation of APEC, OECD and EC, and introduced the regulation system for several countries, such as U.S. U.K and Japan. Also, we analyzed the current issues and problems of self-regulation in Korea and tried to suggest the future direction. There were three different regulations such as market forces, government regulation and self-regulation and the model of self-regulations were shaped in various types. Even though the government made the standard regulations for business sector but it was impossible to direct individual firms and their compliance of those regulations. To compensate the government regulation, the self regulation with low cost is needed and also two kinds of regulations has to be unified to enhance the regulation system in E-commerce. Industries should participate for the regulation voluntarily and consumers must give an award of legislation for self-regulation to motivate the self-regulations of industries.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.30 no.1 s.149
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• pp.31-37
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• 2006

The purpose of this study was to value the present condition of natlwal dyeing, to forecast needs in natural dyeing world and to off the preliminary data on future direction of research and enhancement plan. The three-round Delphi tests were performed with 36 professional in the academic, the industrial, and the art world. The result of the study is as follows: Factor analysis showed the troubles were classified into 4 categories; 'dyeing', 'basis', 'industry' and 'consumer and environment'. Supplementary measures and future direction research 3categories; 'development', 'education' and 'mass production' And commercialization. popularization 2 categories; 'commercialization' and 'popularization'. 'Dyeing' is correlated with 'mass production', 'basis' with 'education' and 'education' with 'commercialization' and 'popularization'. The engaged period in natural dyeing world is longer, professionals were more concerned about 'consumer and environment' The most influential element of the present question in the view is 'education'.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.10
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• pp.501-511
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• 2020

As more consumers are interested in sustainability issues and evaluate brands based on their social responsibility issues involved, firms are using social media platforms in order to communicate with consumers about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. However, the current literature focuses mostly on factors drive engagement of promotional messages, while little evidence was found in the literature on how to design effective CSR messages on social media to engage consumers. Using over 3,000 branded posts on Facebook and Twitter, this research explores factors that help CSR messages become more engaging in social media. The results show that, on average, CSR messages had a negative significant effect on consumer engagement. However, CSR messages became more engaging when designed with emotional appeals, longer texts, and a hashtag. While marginal, CSR messages with informational appeals and humor undermined the effect of CSR messages on engagement. Finally, we explore different types of CSR messages by their beneficiary scope and the role of brands in the message and discuss what message contents drive more engagement in social media. This research contributes to the academic literature and managers by providing new insights on how to design CSR messages for effective communications in social media.

• Journal of Korean Public Health Nursing
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.148-160
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• 2005

Presented here are policy alternatives for understanding home health care for the long-term health care insurance system which is being developed for elderly people starting 2007. The summary of issues concerning home health nursing care under the long-term care insurance system include; 1) absence of comprehensive and systematic policy in home health care deliverly systems; 2) absence of community based home health agencies that are considered as the community residents in general. In order to overcome these problems and Issues, policy alternatives of home health care should 1) establish a comprehensive home health care policy for homebound persons; 2) establish the foundations for home health care nurses and community based home health care systems; 3) establish home health care facilities and infrastructure; and 4) promote research and development concerning home health care. Conclusively, a home health care system should be built on a comprehensive policy vision based on health policy, especially long-term care insurance system in the near future. Every homebound residents service has to be constructed systematically under suitable facilities considering the consumer characteristics and health conditions. By doing this, the consumer based comprehensive community home health care delivery system can be constructed in view of the long-term health care insurance system for elderly people.