• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.37-63
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• 2012

In franchise business, exclusive sales territory (sometimes EST in table) protection is a very important issue from an economic, social and political point of view. It affects the growth and survival of both franchisor and franchisee and often raises issues of social and political conflicts. When franchisee is not familiar with related laws and regulations, franchisor has high chance to utilize it. Exclusive sales territory protection by the manufacturer and distributors (wholesalers or retailers) means sales area restriction by which only certain distributors have right to sell products or services. The distributor, who has been granted exclusive sales territories, can protect its own territory, whereas he may be prohibited from entering in other regions. Even though exclusive sales territory is a quite critical problem in franchise business, there is not much rigorous research about the reason, results, evaluation, and future direction based on empirical data. This paper tries to address this problem not only from logical and nomological validity, but from empirical validation. While we purse an empirical analysis, we take into account the difficulties of real data collection and statistical analysis techniques. We use a set of disclosure document data collected by Korea Fair Trade Commission, instead of conventional survey method which is usually criticized for its measurement error. Existing theories about exclusive sales territory can be summarized into two groups as shown in the table below. The first one is about the effectiveness of exclusive sales territory from both franchisor and franchisee point of view. In fact, output of exclusive sales territory can be positive for franchisors but negative for franchisees. Also, it can be positive in terms of sales but negative in terms of profit. Therefore, variables and viewpoints should be set properly. The other one is about the motive or reason why exclusive sales territory is protected. The reasons can be classified into four groups - industry characteristics, franchise systems characteristics, capability to maintain exclusive sales territory, and strategic decision. Within four groups of reasons, there are more specific variables and theories as below. Based on these theories, we develop nine hypotheses which are briefly shown in the last table below with the results. In order to validate the hypothesis, data is collected from government (FTC) homepage which is open source. The sample consists of 1,896 franchisors and it contains about three year operation data, from 2006 to 2008. Within the samples, 627 have exclusive sales territory protection policy and the one with exclusive sales territory policy is not evenly distributed over 19 representative industries. Additional data are also collected from another government agency homepage, like Statistics Korea. Also, we combine data from various secondary sources to create meaningful variables as shown in the table below. All variables are dichotomized by mean or median split if they are not inherently dichotomized by its definition, since each hypothesis is composed by multiple variables and there is no solid statistical technique to incorporate all these conditions to test the hypotheses. This paper uses a simple chi-square test because hypotheses and theories are built upon quite specific conditions such as industry type, economic condition, company history and various strategic purposes. It is almost impossible to find all those samples to satisfy them and it can't be manipulated in experimental settings. However, more advanced statistical techniques are very good on clean data without exogenous variables, but not good with real complex data. The chi-square test is applied in a way that samples are grouped into four with two criteria, whether they use exclusive sales territory protection or not, and whether they satisfy conditions of each hypothesis. So the proportion of sample franchisors which satisfy conditions and protect exclusive sales territory, does significantly exceed the proportion of samples that satisfy condition and do not protect. In fact, chi-square test is equivalent with the Poisson regression which allows more flexible application. As results, only three hypotheses are accepted. When attitude toward the risk is high so loyalty fee is determined according to sales performance, EST protection makes poor results as expected. And when franchisor protects EST in order to recruit franchisee easily, EST protection makes better results. Also, when EST protection is to improve the efficiency of franchise system as a whole, it shows better performances. High efficiency is achieved as EST prohibits the free riding of franchisee who exploits other's marketing efforts, and it encourages proper investments and distributes franchisee into multiple regions evenly. Other hypotheses are not supported in the results of significance testing. Exclusive sales territory should be protected from proper motives and administered for mutual benefits. Legal restrictions driven by the government agency like FTC could be misused and cause mis-understandings. So there need more careful monitoring on real practices and more rigorous studies by both academicians and practitioners.

• Korean Journal of Organic Agriculture
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.43-60
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• 2003

Recently. together with consumers' increasing concerns on food safety and environmental issues. there is increasing demand on the environmentally friendly agricultural products such as organic products. At present, Japan. as a biggest net importing country of the agricultural products. is a market of the international-scale in the organic product marketing. Also. it is expected that the possibility of market expansion in the future is very high. According to the 2000 agricultural census in Japan. the number of the environment-friendly agricultural farmers were 501.556 householders. This number is about 145 percent higher than that of the 1996 results of 204,600 householders. Organic products in Japan were mainly marketed through the producer and consumer cooperation, producers' cooperation, specialized marketing company etc. However, along with the department store, big supermarket and others' participation in the market recently, the marketing channels are diversified. As of October 1999, market sales of the organic products were estimated about 350 billion yen. It is expected that organic certification system, organic products import, resturant industry scale and others will be more influential factors on the market expansion of the organic products in the future.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.23 no.54
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• pp.27-36
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• 2000

The problem of discovering association rules is an emerging research area, whose goal is to extract significant patterns or interesting rules from large databases and several algorithms for mining association rules have been applied to item-oriented sales transaction databases. Data warehouses and OLAP engines are expected to be widely available. OLAP and data mining are complementary; both are important parts of exploiting data. Our study shows that data cube is an efficient structure for mining association rules. OLAP databases are expected to be a major platform for data mining in the future. In this paper, we present an efficient and effective algorithm for mining association rules using data cube. The algorithm can be applicable to enhance the power of competitiveness of business organizations by providing rapid decision support and efficient database marketing through customer segmentation.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.9
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• pp.317-323
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• 2016

Big Data is now seen as a major asset in the company's competitiveness, its influence in the future is expected to grow. Companies that recognize the importance are already actively engaged with Big Data in product development and marketing, which are increasingly applied across sectors of society, including politics, sports. However, lack of knowledge of the system implementation and high costs are still a big obstacles to the introduction of Big Data and systems. It is an objective in this study to build a Big Data system, which is based on open source Hadoop and Hive among Big Data systems, utilizing POS sales data of small and medium-sized offline markets. This approach of convergence is expected to improve existing sales systems that have been simply focusing on profit and loss analysis. It will also be able to use it as the basis for the decisions of the executive to enable prediction of the consumption patterns of customer preference and demand in advance.

• Journal of Korea Society of Waste Management
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• v.35 no.8
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• pp.762-769
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• 2018

This study was carried out to examine the improvement plan by analyzing the characteristics of imported wastes, operation rate, and benefits of energy recovery for incineration facilities with a treatment capacity greater than 50 ton/day. The incineration facility capacity increased by 3,280 tons over 15 years, and the actual incineration rate increased to 2,783 ton/day. The operation rate dropped to 76% in 2010 and then rose again to 81% in 2016. The actual calorific value compared to the design calorific value increased by 33.8% from 94.6% in 2002 to 128.4% in 2016. The recovery efficiency decreased by 29% over 16 years from 110.7% to 81.7% in 2002. Recovery and sales of thermal energy from the incinerator (capacity 200 ton/day) dominated the operation cost, and operating income was generated by energy sales (such as power generation and steam). The treatment capacity increased by 11% to 18% after the recalculation of the incineration capacity and has remained consistently above 90% in most facilities to date. In order to solve the problem of high calorific value waste, wastewater, leachate, and clean water should be mixed and incinerated, and heat recovery should be performed through a water-cooled grate and water cooling wall installation. Twenty-five of the 38 incineration facilities (about 70%) are due for a major repair. After the main repair of the facility, the operation rate is expected to increase and the operating cost is expected to decline due to energy recovery. Inspection and repair should be carried out in a timely manner to increase incineration and heat energy recovery efficiencies.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2010.11a
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• pp.102.2-102.2
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• 2010

We are to evaluate the stabilization technology of actual biogas plant facilities, which is operating currently. It describes the traits of the consistent facilities of mesophilic anaerobic digestion using Unison Biogas plant Recovery system(UBR). Also the economical efficiency is examined with the electric power sales earnings and applying the deserted heating by generating electric power, which is generated by operated combined heat and power using biogas produced by mesophilic anaerobic digestion. We have generated the 481,113kw for electric power and 1,376Gcal for thermal energy simultaneously. If these electric power and thermal energy are converted into diesel, we can achieve savings equal to 114,300L, and 152,109L in the quantity of heat. Finally, if CDM, RPS, liquid fertilizer sales business, etc. is activated, the earnings will be expected to improve dramatically and is considered to contribute a drop of the greenhouse gas.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.499-506
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• 2017

Consideration of influential factors through division of capital market sector and interest rate sector to find and resolve the problems in current housing market and leasing market will become an important index to prepare measures for stabilization of housing sales market and housing lease market. Furthermore, a guideline will be provide you with preliminary data using Big Data to prepare for sudden price fluctuation because expected economic crisis, stock market situation, and uncertain future financial crisis can be predicted which may help anticipate real estate price index such as housing sales price index and housing lease price index.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.23-31
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• 2000

Many studies in marketing and economics have attempted to model price and sales path under the dynamic diffusion process. Most of these models have been based on a fixed product lifetime. The current business climate requiring intensive development of new products however affects the diffusion of new products and their lifetime. Many products have not enjoyed the expected life cycle at the launching stage due to intense technical development competitive reactions, and financial problems. Most diffusion models however have not taken account of the lifetime uncertainty of new product. If the products do not last over the planning horizon set by those models. the optimal price derived from them could be futile. Therefore we had better take such lifetime uncertainty into consideration when developing diffusion models, In this paper we study the impact of uncertain product lifetime on its optimal pricing path in non-competitive market. We develop an optimal pricing model under uncertain product lifetimes and conduct a simulation study to investigate their effects on the optimal pricing and corresponding sales paths. The simulation study provides some interesting findings on optimal pricing policy under uncertain product lifetime. This study could be a stepping stone for the further extended study of optimal pricing strategy with uncertain product lifetime.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.270-276
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• 2020

In this paper, we analyze the buyer's joint pricing and lot-sizing model in a two-stage supply chain consisting of the supplier, the buyer and the customer. It is assumed that the supplier will permit a certain fixed period for settling the amount the buyer owes to him for the items supplied in order to stimulate the demand for the product. Generally, credit transactions would have a positive effect to the buyer. The availability of credit transactions from the supplier effectively reduces the cost of holding stocks for the buyer and therefore, the buyer has a lot of price options to choose his sales price for a customer in anticipation of increased the customer's demand and, as a result, it will appear to increase the buyer's inventory levels. On the other hand, in the case of decaying products in which their utility decay over time, the decaying rate with time may be expected to reduce inventory levels. In this regard, we need to analyze how much the length of credit period and the decaying rate affect the buyer's pricing and lot-sizing policy. For the analysis, we consider the situation where the customer's demand is represented as a linearly decreasing function of the buyer's sales price. From this perspective, we formulate the buyer's annual net profit and analyze the effect of the length of credit period and decaying rate of the product on the buyer's inventory policy numerically.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.120-126
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• 2014

This paper deals with the economic value analysis of meteorological forecasts for a hypothetical inventory decision-making situation in the pharmaceutical industry. The value of Asian dust (AD) forecasts is assessed in terms of the expected value of profits by using a decision tree, which is transformed from the specific payoff structure. The forecast user is assumed to determine the inventory level by considering base profit, inventory cost, and lost sales cost. We estimate the information value of AD forecasts by comparing the two cases of decision-making with or without the AD forecast. The proposed method is verified for the real data of AD forecasts and events in Seoul during the period 2004~2008. The results indicate that AD forecasts can provide the forecast users with benefits, which have various ranges of values according to the relative rate of inventory and lost sales cost.