• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.51-69
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• 2020

Now, it is a stylized fact that a small number of technology firms such as Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and a few others have become larger and dominant players in an industry. Coupled with the rise of these leading firms, we have also observed that a large number of young firms have become an acquisition target in their early IPO stages. This indeed results in a sharp decline in the number of new entries in public exchanges although a series of policy reforms have been promulgated to foster competition through an increase in new entries. Given the observed industry trend in recent decades, a number of studies have reported increased concentration in most developed countries. However, it is less understood as to what caused an increase in industry concentration. In this paper, we uncover the mechanisms by which industries have become concentrated over the last decades by tracing the changes in industry concentration associated with a firm's status change in its early IPO stages. To this end, we put emphasis on the case in which firms are acquired shortly after they went public. Especially, with the transition to digital-based economies, it is imperative for incumbent firms to adapt and keep pace with new ICT and related intelligent systems. For instance, after the acquisition of a young firm equipped with AI-based solutions, an incumbent firm may better respond to a change in customer taste and preference by integrating acquired AI solutions and analytics skills into multiple business processes. Accordingly, it is not unusual for young ICT firms become an attractive acquisition target. To examine the role of M&As involved with young firms in reshaping the level of industry concentration, we identify a firm's status in early post-IPO stages over the sample periods spanning from 1990 to 2016 as follows: i) being delisted, ii) being standalone firms and iii) being acquired. According to our analysis, firms that have conducted IPO since 2000s have been acquired by incumbent firms at a relatively quicker time than those that did IPO in previous generations. We also show a greater acquisition rate for IPO firms in the ICT sector compared with their counterparts in other sectors. Our results based on multinomial logit models suggest that a large number of IPO firms have been acquired in their early post-IPO lives despite their financial soundness. Specifically, we show that IPO firms are likely to be acquired rather than be delisted due to financial distress in early IPO stages when they are more profitable, more mature or less leveraged. For those IPO firms with venture capital backup have also become an acquisition target more frequently. As a larger number of firms are acquired shortly after their IPO, our results show increased concentration. While providing limited evidence on the impact of large incumbent firms in explaining the change in industry concentration, our results show that the large firms' effect on industry concentration are pronounced in the ICT sector. This result possibly captures the current trend that a few tech giants such as Alphabet, Apple and Facebook continue to increase their market share. In addition, compared with the acquisitions of non-ICT firms, the concentration impact of IPO firms in early stages becomes larger when ICT firms are acquired as a target. Our study makes new contributions. To our best knowledge, this is one of a few studies that link a firm's post-IPO status to associated changes in industry concentration. Although some studies have addressed concentration issues, their primary focus was on market power or proprietary software. Contrast to earlier studies, we are able to uncover the mechanism by which industries have become concentrated by placing emphasis on M&As involving young IPO firms. Interestingly, the concentration impact of IPO firm acquisitions are magnified when a large incumbent firms are involved as an acquirer. This leads us to infer the underlying reasons as to why industries have become more concentrated with a favor of large firms in recent decades. Overall, our study sheds new light on the literature by providing a plausible explanation as to why industries have become concentrated.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.21-41
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• 2019

Thanks to the rapid development of information technologies, the data available on Internet have grown rapidly. In this era of big data, many studies have attempted to offer insights and express the effects of data analysis. In the tourism and hospitality industry, many firms and studies in the era of big data have paid attention to online reviews on social media because of their large influence over customers. As tourism is an information-intensive industry, the effect of these information networks on social media platforms is more remarkable compared to any other types of media. However, there are some limitations to the improvements in service quality that can be made based on opinions on social media platforms. Users on social media platforms represent their opinions as text, images, and so on. Raw data sets from these reviews are unstructured. Moreover, these data sets are too big to extract new information and hidden knowledge by human competences. To use them for business intelligence and analytics applications, proper big data techniques like Natural Language Processing and data mining techniques are needed. This study suggests an analytical approach to directly yield insights from these reviews to improve the service quality of hotels. Our proposed approach consists of topic mining to extract topics contained in the reviews and the decision tree modeling to explain the relationship between topics and ratings. Topic mining refers to a method for finding a group of words from a collection of documents that represents a document. Among several topic mining methods, we adopted the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, which is considered as the most universal algorithm. However, LDA is not enough to find insights that can improve service quality because it cannot find the relationship between topics and ratings. To overcome this limitation, we also use the Classification and Regression Tree method, which is a kind of decision tree technique. Through the CART method, we can find what topics are related to positive or negative ratings of a hotel and visualize the results. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the representation of an analytical approach for the improvement of hotel service quality from unstructured review data sets. Through experiments for four hotels in Hong Kong, we can find the strengths and weaknesses of services for each hotel and suggest improvements to aid in customer satisfaction. Especially from positive reviews, we find what these hotels should maintain for service quality. For example, compared with the other hotels, a hotel has a good location and room condition which are extracted from positive reviews for it. In contrast, we also find what they should modify in their services from negative reviews. For example, a hotel should improve room condition related to soundproof. These results mean that our approach is useful in finding some insights for the service quality of hotels. That is, from the enormous size of review data, our approach can provide practical suggestions for hotel managers to improve their service quality. In the past, studies for improving service quality relied on surveys or interviews of customers. However, these methods are often costly and time consuming and the results may be biased by biased sampling or untrustworthy answers. The proposed approach directly obtains honest feedback from customers' online reviews and draws some insights through a type of big data analysis. So it will be a more useful tool to overcome the limitations of surveys or interviews. Moreover, our approach easily obtains the service quality information of other hotels or services in the tourism industry because it needs only open online reviews and ratings as input data. Furthermore, the performance of our approach will be better if other structured and unstructured data sources are added.

• Journal of Sericultural and Entomological Science
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.21-48
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• 1974

The studies were carried out to disclose the physical and chemical properties of sericin fraction obtained from silk cocoon shells and its characteristics of swelling and solubility. The following results were obtained. 1. The physical and chemical properties of sericin fraction. 1) In contrast to the easy water soluble sericin, the hard soluble sericin contains fewer amino acids include of polar side radical while the hard soluble amino acid sach as alanine and leucine were detected. 2) The easy soluble amino acids were found mainly on the outer part of the fibroin, but the hard soluble amino acids were located in the near parts to the fibroin. 3) The swelling and solubility of the sericin could be hardly assayed by the analysis of the amino acid composition, and could be considered to tee closely related to the compound of the sericin crystal and secondary structure. 4) The X-ray patterns of the cocoon filament were ring shape, but they disappeared by the degumming treatment. 5) The sericin of tussah silkworm (A. pernyi), showed stronger circular patterns in the meridian than the regular silkworm (Bombyx mori). 6) There was no pattern difference between Fraction A and B. 7) X-ray diffraction patterns of the Sericin 1, ll and 111 were similar except interference of 8.85A (side chain spacing). 8) The amino acids above 150 in molecular weight such as Cys. Tyr. Phe. His. and Arg. were not found quantitatively by the 60 minutes-hydrolysis (6N-HCI). 9) The X-ray Pattern of 4.6A had a tendency to disappear with hot-water, ether, and alcohol treatment. 10) The partial hydrolysis of sericin showed a cirucular interference (2A) on the meridian. 11) The sericin pellet after hydrolysis was considered to be peptides composed with specific amino acids. 12) The decomposing temperature of Sericin 111 was higher than that of Sericin I and II. 13) Thermogram of the inner portioned sericin of the cocoon shell had double endothermic peaks at 165$^{\circ}C$, and 245$^{\circ}C$, and its decomposing temperature was higher than that of other portioned sericin. 14) The infrared spectroscopic properties among sericin I, II, III and sericin extracted from each layer portion of the cocoon shell were similar. II. The characteristics of seriein swelling and solubility related with silk processing. 1) Fifteen minutes was required to dehydrate the free moisture of cocoon shells with centrifugal force controlled at 13${\times}$10$^4$ dyne/g at 3,000 R.P.M. B) It took 30 minutes for the sericin to show positive reaction with the Folin-Ciocaltue reagent at room temperature. 3) The measurable wave length of the visible radiation was 500-750m${\mu}$, and the highest absorbance was observed at the wave length of 650m${\mu}$. 4) The colorimetric analysis should be conducted at 650mu for low concentration (10$\mu\textrm{g}$/$m\ell$), and at 500m${\mu}$ for the higher concentration to obtain an exact analysis. 5) The absorbing curves of sericin and egg albumin at different wave lengths were similar, but the absorbance of the former was slightly higher than that of the latter. 6) The quantity of the sericin measured by the colorimetric analysis, turned out to be less than by the Kjeldahl method. 7) Both temperature and duration in the cocoon cooking process has much effect on the swelling and solubility of the cocoon shells, but the temperature was more influential than the duration of the treatment. 8) The factorial relation between the temperature and the duration of treatment of the cocoon cooking to check for siricin swelling and solubility showed that the treatment duration should be gradually increased to reach optimum swelling and solubility of sericin with low temperature(70$^{\circ}C$) . High temperature, however, showed more sharp increase. 9) The more increased temperature in the drying of fresh cocoons, the less the sericin swelling and solubility were obtained. 10) In a specific cooking duration, the heavier the cocoon shell is, the less the swelling and solubility were obtained. 11) It was considered that there are differences in swelling or solubility between the filaments of each cocoon layer. 12) Sericin swelling or solubility in the cocoon filament was decreased by the wax extraction.. 13) The ionic surface active agent accelerated the swelling and solubility of the sericin at the range of pH 6-7. 14) In the same conditions as above, the cation agent was absorbed into the sericin. 15) In case of the increase of Ca ang Mg in the reeling water, its pH value drifted toward the acidity. 16) A buffering action was observed between the sericin and the water hardness constituents in the reeling water. 17) The effect of calcium on the swelling and solubility of the sericin was more moderate than that of magnecium. 18) The solute of the water hardness constituents increased the electric conductivity in the reeling water.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.19-45
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• 2008

This study is to empirically examine the primary dimensions of visual merchandising (VMD) of internet shopping mall, namely store design, merchandise, and merchandising cues, to be a attractive virtual store to the shoppers. The authors reviewed the literature related to the major components of VMD from the perspective of the AIDA model, which has been mainly applied to the offline store settings. The major purposes of the study are as follows; first, tries to derive the variables related with the components of visual merchandising through reviewing the existing literatures, establish the hypotheses, and test it empirically. Second, examines the relationships between the components of VMD and the attitude toward the VMD, however, putting more emphasis on finding out the component structure of the VMD. VMD needs to be examined with the perspective that an online shopping mall is a virtual self-service or clerkless store, which could reduce the number of employees, help the shoppers search, evaluate and purchase for themselves, and to be explored in terms of the in-store persuasion processes of customers. This study reviewed the literatures related to store design, merchandise, and merchandising cues which might be relevant to the store, product, and promotion respectively. VMD is a total communication tool, and AIDA model could explain the in-store consumer behavior of online shopping. Store design has to do with triggering a consumer attention to the online mall, merchandise with a product related interest, and merchandising cues with promotions such as recommendation and links that induce the desire to pruchase. These three steps might be seen as the processes for purchase actions. The theoretical rationale for the relationship between VMD and AIDA could be found in Tyagi(2005) that the three steps of consumer-oriented merchandising are a store, a product assortment, and placement, in Omar(1999) that three types of interior display are a architectural design display, commodity display, and point-of-sales(POS) display, and in Davies and Ward(2005) that the retail store interior image is related to an atmosphere, merchandise, and in-store promotion. Lee et al(2000) suggested as the web merchandising components a merchandising cues, a shopping metaphor which is an assistant tool for search, a store design, a layout(web design), and a product assortment. The store design which includes differentiation, simplicity and navigation is supposed to be related to the attention to the virtual store. Second, the merchandise dimensions comprising product assortments, visual information and product reputation have to do with the interest in the product offerings. Finally, the merchandising cues that refer to merchandiser(MD)'s recommendation of products and providing the hyperlinks to relevant goods for the shopper is concerned with attempt to induce the desire to purchase. The questionnaire survey was carried out to collect the data about the consumers who would shop at internet shopping malls frequently. To select the subject malls, the mall ranking data announced by a mall rating agency was used to differentiate the most popular and least popular five mall each. The subjects was instructed to answer the questions after navigating the designated mall for five minutes. The 300 questionnaire was distributed to the consumers, 166 samples were used in the final analysis. The empirical testing focused on identifying and confirming the dimensionality of VMD and its subdimensions using a structural equation modeling method. The confirmatory factor analysis for the endogeneous and exogeneous variables was carried out in four parts. The second-order factor analysis was done for a store design, a merchandise, and a merchandising cues, and first-order confirmatory factor analysis for the attitude toward the VMD. The model test results shows that the chi-square value of structural equation is 144.39(d.f 49), significant at 0.01 level which means the proposed model was rejected. But, judging from the ratio of chi-square value vs. degree of freedom, the ratio was 2.94 which smaller than an acceptable level of 3.0, RMR is 0.087 which is higher than a generally acceptable level of 0.08. GFI and AGFI is turned out to be 0.90 and 0.84 respectively. Both NFI and NNFI is 0.94, and CFI 0.95. The major test results are as follows; first, the second-order factor analysis and structural equational modeling reveals that the differentiation, simplicity and ease of identifying current status of the transaction are confirmed to be subdimensions of store design and to be a significant predictors of the dependent variable. This result implies that when designing an online shopping mall, it is necessary to differentiate visually from other malls to improve the effectiveness of the communications of store design. That is, the differentiated store design raise the contrast stimulus to sensory organs to promote the memory of the store and to have a favorable attitude toward the VMD of a store. The results that navigation which means the easiness of identifying current status of shopping affects the attitude to VMD could be interpreted that the navigating processes via the hyperlinks which is characteristics of an internet shopping is a complex and cognitive process and shoppers are likely to lack the sense of overall structure of the store. Consequently, shoppers are likely to be alost amid shopping not knowing where to go. The orientation tool enhance the accessibility of information to raise the perceptive power about the store environment.(Titus & Everett 1995) Second, the primary dimension of merchandise and its subdimensions was confirmed to be unidimensional respectively, have a construct validity, and nomological validity which the VMD dimensions supposed to have a positive correlation with the dependent variable. The subdimensions of product assortment, brand fame and information provision proved to have a positive effect on the attitude toward the VMD. It could be interpreted that the more plentiful the product and brand assortment of the mall is, the more likely the shoppers to favor it. Brand fame and information provision as well affect the VMD attitude, which means that the more famous the brand, the more likely the shoppers would trust and feel familiar with the mall, and the plentifully and visually presented information could have the shopper have a favorable attitude toward the store VMD. Third, it turned out to be that merchandising cue of product recommendation and hyperlinks affect the VMD attitude. This could be interpreted that recommended products could reduce the uncertainty related with the purchase decision, and the hyperlinks to relevant products would help the shopper save the cognitive effort exerted into the information search and gathering, which could lead to a favorable attitude to the VMD. This study tried to sheds some new light on the VMD of online store by reviewing the variables mentioned to be relevant with offline VMD in the existing literatures, and tried to link the VMD components from the perspective of AIDA model. The effect size of the VMD dimensions on the attitude was in the order of the merchandise, the store design and the merchandising cues.It is said that an internet has an unlimited place for display, however, the virtual store is not unlimited since the consumer has a limited amount of cognitive ability to process the external information and internal memory. Particularly, the shoppers are likely to face some difficulties in decision making on account of too many alternative and information overloads. Therefore, the internet shopping mall manager should take into consideration the cost of information search on the part of the consumer, to establish the optimal product placements and search routes. An efficient store composition would be possible by reducing the psychological burdens and cognitive efforts exerted to information search and alternatives evaluation. The store image is in most part determined by the product category and its brand it deals in. The results of this study support this proposition that the merchandise is most important to the VMD attitude than other components, the manager is required to take a strategic approach to VMD. The internet users are getting more accustomed and more knowledgeable about the internet media and more likely to accept the internet as a shopping channel as the period of time during which they use the internet to shop become longer. The web merchandiser should be aware that the product introduction using a moving pictures and a bulletin board become more important in order to present the interactive product information visually and communicate with customers more actively, therefore leading to making the quantity and quality of product information more rich.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.59-87
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• 2014

In MIS field, the researches on payment services are focused on adoption factors of payment service using behavior theories such as TRA(Theory of Reasoned Action), TAM(Technology Acceptance Model), and TPB (Theory of Planned Behavior). The previous researches presented various adoption factors according to types of payment service, nations, culture and so on even though adoption factors of identical payment service were presented differently by researchers. The payment service industry relatively has strong path dependency to the existing payment methods so that the research results on the identical payment service are different due to payment culture of nation. This paper aims to suggest a successful adoption factor of noble payment service regardless of nation's culture and characteristics of payment and prove it. In previous researches, common adoption factors of payment service are convenience, ease of use, security, convenience, speed etc. But real cases prove the fact that adoption factors that the previous researches present are not always critical to success to penetrate a market. For example, PayByPhone, NFC based parking payment service, successfully has penetrated to early market and grown. In contrast, Google Wallet service failed to be adopted to users despite NFC based payment method which provides convenience, security, ease of use. As shown in upper case, there remains an unexplained aspect. Therefore, the present research question emerged from the question: "What is the more essential and fundamental factor that should takes precedence over factors such as provides convenience, security, ease of use for successful penetration to market". With these cases, this paper analyzes four cases predicted on the following hypothesis and demonstrates it. "To successfully penetrate a market and sustainably grow, new payment service should find non-customer of the existing payment service and provide noble payment method so that they can use payment method". We give plausible explanations for the hypothesis using multiple case studies. Diners club, Danal, PayPal, Square were selected as a typical and successful cases in each category of payment service. The discussion on cases is primarily non-customer analysis that noble payment service targets on to find the most crucial factor in the early market, we does not attempt to consider factors for business growth. We clarified three-tier non-customer of the payment method that new payment service targets on and elaborated how new payment service satisfy them. In case of credit card, this payment service target first tier of non-customer who can't pay for because they don't have any cash temporarily but they have regular income. So credit card provides an opportunity which they can do economic activities by delaying the date of payment. In a result of wireless phone payment's case study, this service targets on second of non-customer who can't use online payment because they concern about security or have to take a complex process and learn how to use online payment method. Therefore, wireless phone payment provides very convenient payment method. Especially, it made group of young pay for a little money without a credit card. Case study result of PayPal, online payment service, shows that it targets on second tier of non-customer who reject to use online payment service because of concern about sensitive information leaks such as passwords and credit card details. Accordingly, PayPal service allows users to pay online without a provision of sensitive information. Final Square case result, Mobile POS -based payment service, also shows that it targets on second tier of non-customer who can't individually transact offline because of cash's shortness. Hence, Square provides dongle which function as POS by putting dongle in earphone terminal. As a result, four cases made non-customer their customer so that they could penetrate early market and had been extended their market share. Consequently, all cases supported the hypothesis and it is highly probable according to 'analytic generation' that case study methodology suggests. We present for judging the quality of research designs the following. Construct validity, internal validity, external validity, reliability are common to all social science methods, these have been summarized in numerous textbooks(Yin, 2014). In case study methodology, these also have served as a framework for assessing a large group of case studies (Gibbert, Ruigrok & Wicki, 2008). Construct validity is to identify correct operational measures for the concepts being studied. To satisfy construct validity, we use multiple sources of evidence such as the academic journals, magazine and articles etc. Internal validity is to seek to establish a causal relationship, whereby certain conditions are believed to lead to other conditions, as distinguished from spurious relationships. To satisfy internal validity, we do explanation building through four cases analysis. External validity is to define the domain to which a study's findings can be generalized. To satisfy this, replication logic in multiple case studies is used. Reliability is to demonstrate that the operations of a study -such as the data collection procedures- can be repeated, with the same results. To satisfy this, we use case study protocol. In Korea, the competition among stakeholders over mobile payment industry is intensifying. Not only main three Telecom Companies but also Smartphone companies and service provider like KakaoTalk announced that they would enter into mobile payment industry. Mobile payment industry is getting competitive. But it doesn't still have momentum effect notwithstanding positive presumptions that will grow very fast. Mobile payment services are categorized into various technology based payment service such as IC mobile card and Application payment service of cloud based, NFC, sound wave, BLE(Bluetooth Low Energy), Biometric recognition technology etc. Especially, mobile payment service is discontinuous innovations that users should change their behavior and noble infrastructure should be installed. These require users to learn how to use it and cause infra-installation cost to shopkeepers. Additionally, payment industry has the strong path dependency. In spite of these obstacles, mobile payment service which should provide dramatically improved value as a products and service of discontinuous innovations is focusing on convenience and security, convenience and so on. We suggest the following to success mobile payment service. First, non-customers of the existing payment service need to be identified. Second, needs of them should be taken. Then, noble payment service provides non-customer who can't pay by the previous payment method to payment method. In conclusion, mobile payment service can create new market and will result in extension of payment market.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.17
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• pp.1-44
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• 1974

These studies were made at Suwon in 1972 and at Suwon, Iri, and Kwangju in 1973 to investigate grain filling process and variation of grain quality of NB 68513 and Caprock as hard red winter wheat, Suke ＃169 as soft red winter wheat variety and Yungkwang as semi-hard winter variety, grown under-three different fertilizer levels and seeding dates. Other experiments were conducted to find the effects of temperature, humidity and light intensity on the grain filling process and grain quality of Yungkwang and NB 68513 wheat varieties. These, experiments were conducted at Suwon in 1973 and 1974. 1. Grain filling process of wheat cultivars: 1) The frequency distribution of a grain weight shows that wider distribution of grain weight was associated with large grain groups rather than small grain group. In the large grain groups, the frequency was mostly concentrated near mean value, while the frequency was dispersed over the values in the small grain group. 2) The grain weight was more affected by the grain thickness and width than by grain length. 3) The grain weight during the ripening period was rapidly increased from 14 days after flowering to 35 days in Yungkwang and from 14 days after flowering to 28 days in NB 68513. The large grain group, Yungkwang was rather slowly increased and took a longer period in increase of endosperm ratio of grain than the small grain group, NB 68513. 4) In general, the 1, 000 grain weight was reduced under high temperature, low humidity, while it was increased under low temperature and high humidity condition, and under high temperature and humidity condition. The effect of shading on grain weight was greater in high temperature than in low temperature condition and no definite tendency was found in high humidity condition. 5) The effects of temperature, humidity and shading on 1, 000 grain weight were greater in large-grain group, Yungkwang than in small grain group, NB 68513. Highly significant positive correlation was found between 1, 000 grain weight and days to ripening. 6) The 1, 000 grain weight and test weight were increased more or less as the fertilizer levels applied were increased. However, the rate of increasing 1, 000 grain weight was low when fertilizer levels were increased from standard to double. The 1, 000 grain weight was high when planted early. Such tendency was greater in Suwon than in Kwangju or Iri area. 2. Milling quality: 7) The milling rate in a same group of varieties was higher under the condition of low temperature, high humidity and early maturing culture which were responsible for increasing 1, 000 grain weight. No definite relations were found along with locations. 8) In the varieties tested, the higher milling rate was found in large grain variety, Yungkwang, and the lowest milling rate was obtained from Suke ＃ 169, the small grain variety. But the small grained hard wheat variety such as Caprock and NB 68513 showed higher milling rate compared with the soft wheat variety, Suke ＃ 169. 9) There were no great differences of ash content due to location, fertilizer level and seeding date while remarkable differences due to variety were found. The ash content was high in the hard wheat varieties such as NB 68513, Caprock and low in soft wheat varieties such as Yungkwang and Suke ＃ 169. 3. Protein content: 10) The protein content was increased under the condition of high temperature, low humidity and shading, which were responsible for reduction of 1, 000 grain weight. The varietal differences of protein content due to high temperature, low humidity and shading conditions were greater in Yungkwang than in NB 68513. 11) The high content of protein in grain within one to two weeks after flowering might be due to the high ratio of pericarp and embryo to endosperm. As grains ripen, the effects of embryo and pericarp on protein content were decreased, reducing protein content. However, the protein content was getting increased from three or four weeks after flowering, and maximized at seven weeks after flowering. The protein content of grain at three to four weeks after flowering increased as the increase of 1, 000 grain weight. But the protein content of matured grain appeared to be affected by daily temperature on calender rather than by duration of ripening period. 12) Highly significant positive correlation value was found between the grain protein content and flour protein content. 13) The protein content was increased under the high level of fertilizers and late seeding. The local differences of protein content were greater in Suwon than in Kwangju and Iri. 14) Protein content in the varieties tested were high in Yungkwang, NB 68513 and Caprock, and low in Suke ＃ 169. However, variation in protein content due to the cultural methods was low in Suke ＃ 169. 15) Protein yield per unit area was increased in accordance with increase of fertilizer levels and early maturing culture. However, nitrogen fertilizer was utilized rather effectively in early maturing culture and Yungkwang was the highest in protein yield per unit area. 4. Physio-chemical properties of wheat flour: 16) Sedimentation value was higher under the conditions of high temperature, low humidity and high levels of fertilizers than under the conditions of low temperature, high moisture and low levels of fertilizers. Such differences of sedimentation values were more apparent in NB 68513 and Caprock than Yungkwang and Suke ＃ 169. The local difference of sedimentation value was greater in Suwon than in Kwangju and Iri. Even though the sedimentation value was highly correlated with protein content of grain, the high humidity was considered one of the factors affecting sedimentation value. 17) Changes of Pelshenke values due to the differences of cultural practices and locations were generally coincident with sedimentation values. 18) The mixing time required for mixogram was four to six minutes in NB 68513, five to seven minutes in Cap rock. The great variation of mixing time for Yungkwang and Suke ＃ 169 due to location and planting conditions was found. The mixing height and area were high in hard wheat than in soft wheat. Variation of protein content due to cultural methods were inconsistent. However, the pattern of mixogram were very much same regardless the treatments applied. With this regard, it could be concluded that the mixogram is a kind of method expressing the specific character of the variety. 19) Even though the milling property of NB 68513 and Caprock was deteriorated under either high temperature and low humidity of high fertilizer levels and late seeding conditions, baking quality was better due to improved physio-chemical properties of flour. In contrast, early maturing culture deteriorated physio-chemical properties, milling property of grain and grain protein yield per unit area was increased. However, it might be concluded that the hard wheat production of NB 68513 and Caprock for baking purpose could be done better in Suwon than in Iri or Kwangju area. 5. Interrelationships between the physio-chemical characters of wheat flour: 20) Physio-chemical properties of flour didn't have direct relationship with milling rate and ash content. Low grain weight produced high protein content and better physio-chemical flour properties. 21) In hard wheat varieties like NB 68513 and Caprock, protein content was significantly correlated with sedimentation value, Pelshenke value and mixing height. However, gluten strength and baking quality were improved by the increased protein content. In Yungkwang and Suk ＃ 169, protein content was correlated with sedimentation value, but no correlations were found with Pelshenke value and mixing height. Consequently, increase of protein content didn't improve the gluten strength in soft wheat. 22) The highly significant relationships between protein content and gluten strength and sedimentation . value, and between Pelshenke value, mixogram and gluten strength indicated that the determination of mixogram and Pelshenke value are useful for de terming soft and hard type of varieties. Determination of sedimentation value is considered useful method for quality evaluation of wheat grain under different cultural practices.