• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.25-53
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• 2011

This study probes the effect of loyalty program on the customer retention based on the real transaction data(n=2,892) acquired from education service industry. We try to figure out the outcomes of reward program through more than 1 year-long data gathered and analyzed according to quasi-experimental design(i.e., before and after design). We adopt this kinds of research scheme in regard that previous studies measured the effect of loyalty program by dividing the customers into two group(i.e., members vs. non-members) after the firms or stores had started the program. We believe that it might not avoid the self-selection bias. The research questions of this study could be explained such as: First, most research said that the loyalty programs could increase the customer loyalty and contribute to the sustainable growth of company. But there are little confirmation that this promotional tool could be justified in terms of financial perspective. Thus, we are interested in both the retention rate and financial outcomes caused by the introduction of loyalty programs. Second, reward programs target mainly current customer. Especially CRM(customer relationship management) said that it is more profitable for company to build positive relationship with current customer instead of pursuing new customer. And it claims that reward program is excellent means to achieve this goal. For this purpose, we check in this study whether there is a interaction effect between loyalty program and customer type in retaining customer. Third, it is said that dis-satisfied customers are more likely to leave the company than satisfied customers. While, Bolton, Kannan and Bramlett(2000) claimed that reward program could contribute to minimize the effect of negative service by building emotional link with customer, it is not empirically confirmed. This point of view explained that the loyalty programs might work as exit barrier to current customer. Thus, this study tries to identify whether there is a interaction effect between loyalty program and service experience in keeping customer. To achieve this purpose, this study adopt both Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazard model. The research outcomes show that the average retention period is 179 days before introducing loyalty program but it is increased to 227 days after reward is given to the customers. Since this difference is statistically significant, it could be said that H1 is supported. In addition, the contribution margin coming from increased transaction period is bigger than the cost for administering loyalty programs. To address other research questions, we probe the interaction effect between loyalty program and other factors(i.e., customer type and service experience) affecting it. The analysis of Cox proportional hazard model said that the current customer is more likely to engage in building relationship with company compared to new customer. In addition, retention rate of satisfied customer is significantly increased in relation to dis-satisfied customer. Interestingly, the transaction period of dis-satisfied customer is notably increased after introducing loyalty programs. Thus, it could be said that H2, H3, and H4 are also supported. In summary, we found that the loyalty programs have values as a promotional tool in forming positive relationship with customer and building exit barrier.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.47-64
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• 2017

Three years after establishment, companies are said to face a period of risk called the "valley of death." To start a venture company and make it sustainable, the chance of failure must be minimized. According to an in-depth assessment report on special taxation in 2015, the one-year survival rate of Korean companies was about 60 percent and the five-year survival rate about 30%. These rates are low compared to those of major OECD member countries. Worse, such rates in Korea are decreasing year by year. The purpose of this study is to classify the success factors behind venture companies into human capital, social capital and financial capital, and verify through empirical analysis the factors influencing the success of venture companies based on the mediating roles of capability of the startup team and that for innovation. To find the success factors behind venture companies, this study first examined the theories derived from previous studies. SPSS 21 was used as the study method, while descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and CMB test were conducted. In addition, SmartPLS 2 was used for confirmatory factor analysis, hypothesis test, mediation effect. The results of this study can help efforts toward job creation and economic revitalization pursued by the creative economy policy of the incumbent Korean administration. They can also be used as the cornerstone for venture companies in their pursuit of success.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.735-749
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• 2022

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) has an impact on auditors' audit efforts. MD&A is a means of disclosure that provides information about a company from the management's perspective in financial reporting. The MD&A is a standardized format of nonfinancial information that can be useful for the stake-holders. The auditors have incentives to utilize the nonfinancial information contained in the MD&A for their decision-making. We posit that the MD&A disclosure quality is associated with the level of audit efforts. Methods: We hand-collect the disclosure data from the Financial Supervisory Service of Korea (the Korean SEC). Results: By employing two measures of audit efforts, we document evidence that the quality of MD&A is associated with both audit hours and audit fees. Conclusion: It implies that the auditors perform intensive audit work for companies with high-quality disclosure of MD&A. The study contributes to the literature by providing the first approach to examine the association between the MD&A disclosure and audit efforts.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.5-10
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• 2012

Currently, the rewards programs offered by many companies to strengthen customer relationships have been working quite well. In addition, many companies' rewards programs, designed for stabilizing revenue, are recognized to be effective. However, these rewards programs are not significantly differentiated between companies and there are no accurate conclusions currently, which can be made about their effects. Because of this, a company with a customer rewards program may not comprehend the true level of active participation. In this environment some companies' rewards programs inadvertently hinder business profitability as a side effect while attempting to increase customer loyalty. In fact, airline and oil companies pass on the financial cost of their programs to the customer, and as a result, they have been criticized publicly. The result of this is that the corporations with bad rewards programs tend to get a bad image. In this study of stores' rewards programs, we centered our focus on the design of the program. The main problem in this study is to recognize the financial value of the rewards program and whether it can create a competitive edge for the companies despite the cost issues experienced by them. Customers receiving financial rewards for their business may be just as satisfied with a particular company or store versus those who are not, and the program, perhaps, does not form a distinctive competitive advantage. When the customer is deciding between competing companies to secure their product needs with, we wanted to figure out how much of an affect a valuable reward program had on their decision making. To evaluate this, we set the first hypothesis as, "based on the level of involvement of the customers, there is a difference between customers' preferences for rewards programs." In the results of Experiment 1 we saw that in a financial compensation program for high-involvement groups and low-involvement groups, significant differences appeared and Hypothesis 1 was partially supported. As for the second hypothesis that "customers will have different preferences between a financial rewards programs (SE) and a joint rewards programs (JE)," the analysis showed that the preference for JE was significantly higher than that for other programs. In addition, through Experiment 2, we were able to find meaningful results, which revealed that consumers have shown a significant difference in their preferences between SE and JE. The purpose of these experiments was to enable the designing of a rewards program by learning how to enhance service information distribution and strengthen customer relationships. From the results, there should be a great amount of value for future service-related endeavors and academic research programs. The research is significant, because the results can be found to have a positive effect on reward program designs however, it does have the following limitations. First, this study was performed using an experiment, and all experiments have limitations. Second, although there was an individual evaluation and a joint evaluation, setting a proper evaluation criteria was difficult. In this study, 1,000 Korean won (KRW) in the individual evaluation had a value of 2 points, and, in the joint evaluation, 1,000 KRW had a value of 1 point. There may have been alternative ways to differentiate the evaluations to obtain the proper results. In this study, since there was no funding, the experiments were performed orally however, this was complementary to the study. Third, the subjects who participated in this experiment were students. Conducting this study through experimentation was unavoidable for us, and future research should be conducted using an actual program with the target customers.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.47 no.5
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• pp.181-200
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• 2022

After the COVID-19 pandemic, a global economic downturn and a recession in the shipping market are expected, it is important for domestic shipping companies to establish appropriate strategy in response to the recession. Accordingly, domestic shipping companies should grow into integrated logistics companies that combine shipping and logistics in the future. And for this purpose, it is necessary to actively promote logistics integration with external shipping and logistics companies. This paper presents the direction of logistics integration for domestic shipping companies to develop as integrated logistics operators with competitiveness in the global shipping market, and presents detailed alternatives. Domestic shipping companies lack the infrastructure such as ships, port terminals, and warehouses, so they have a weak capacity to independently promote logistics integration. At the shipping company level, a logistics integration promotion strategy should be established, and accordingly, logistics infrastructure, service network, and logistics integration operating system should be established. The government should provide tax benefits for logistics integration, financial support for M&As led by domestic shipping companies, a standardized information sharing system, and preparation of educational courses for nurturing digital manpower.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.227-236
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• 2016

The competition among insurance companies has become increasingly intense driven by the recent changes in financial environment. In this study, we (i) categorize the quality of life insurance services into the core service, relational services, and additional services, (ii) assess the impact of each service on repurchase intension, and (iii) investigate if customer satisfaction has a mediating effect. The research subjects are 215 life insurance customers who were selected from an online survey respondent population. Based on the analysis we performed by utilizing the SPSS 18.0, we concluded that (i) maintaining service of the core services, internal relationship of service personnel and insurance salesmen of the relational service and additional services have a positive impact on repurchase intention and (ii) In the relationships between repurchase intentions, the customer satisfaction is fully mediated by maintaining service and insurance salesman and partially mediated by additional service. The results of this study can be meaningful for both industry and academia, because these results can be utilized as useful evidence in understanding selection behavior of life insurance customers and deriving various strategies in business environment.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.157-178
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• 2009

Corporate credit rating is a very important factor in the market for corporate debt. Information concerning corporate operations is often disseminated to market participants through the changes in credit ratings that are published by professional rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's (S&P) and Moody's Investor Service. Since these agencies generally require a large fee for the service, and the periodically provided ratings sometimes do not reflect the default risk of the company at the time, it may be advantageous for bond-market participants to be able to classify credit ratings before the agencies actually publish them. As a result, it is very important for companies (especially, financial companies) to develop a proper model of credit rating. From a technical perspective, the credit rating constitutes a typical, multiclass, classification problem because rating agencies generally have ten or more categories of ratings. For example, S&P's ratings range from AAA for the highest-quality bonds to D for the lowest-quality bonds. The professional rating agencies emphasize the importance of analysts' subjective judgments in the determination of credit ratings. However, in practice, a mathematical model that uses the financial variables of companies plays an important role in determining credit ratings, since it is convenient to apply and cost efficient. These financial variables include the ratios that represent a company's leverage status, liquidity status, and profitability status. Several statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been applied as tools for predicting credit ratings. Among them, artificial neural networks are most prevalent in the area of finance because of their broad applicability to many business problems and their preeminent ability to adapt. However, artificial neural networks also have many defects, including the difficulty in determining the values of the control parameters and the number of processing elements in the layer as well as the risk of over-fitting. Of late, because of their robustness and high accuracy, support vector machines (SVMs) have become popular as a solution for problems with generating accurate prediction. An SVM's solution may be globally optimal because SVMs seek to minimize structural risk. On the other hand, artificial neural network models may tend to find locally optimal solutions because they seek to minimize empirical risk. In addition, no parameters need to be tuned in SVMs, barring the upper bound for non-separable cases in linear SVMs. Since SVMs were originally devised for binary classification, however they are not intrinsically geared for multiclass classifications as in credit ratings. Thus, researchers have tried to extend the original SVM to multiclass classification. Hitherto, a variety of techniques to extend standard SVMs to multiclass SVMs (MSVMs) has been proposed in the literature Only a few types of MSVM are, however, tested using prior studies that apply MSVMs to credit ratings studies. In this study, we examined six different techniques of MSVMs: (1) One-Against-One, (2) One-Against-AIL (3) DAGSVM, (4) ECOC, (5) Method of Weston and Watkins, and (6) Method of Crammer and Singer. In addition, we examined the prediction accuracy of some modified version of conventional MSVM techniques. To find the most appropriate technique of MSVMs for corporate bond rating, we applied all the techniques of MSVMs to a real-world case of credit rating in Korea. The best application is in corporate bond rating, which is the most frequently studied area of credit rating for specific debt issues or other financial obligations. For our study the research data were collected from National Information and Credit Evaluation, Inc., a major bond-rating company in Korea. The data set is comprised of the bond-ratings for the year 2002 and various financial variables for 1,295 companies from the manufacturing industry in Korea. We compared the results of these techniques with one another, and with those of traditional methods for credit ratings, such as multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), multinomial logistic regression (MLOGIT), and artificial neural networks (ANNs). As a result, we found that DAGSVM with an ordered list was the best approach for the prediction of bond rating. In addition, we found that the modified version of ECOC approach can yield higher prediction accuracy for the cases showing clear patterns.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.11
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• pp.182-190
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• 2018

Many pharmaceutical companies operate the SFA system to support salespeople. The SFA system is used for various behaviors of salespeople. However, there is a lack of empirical analysis on the performance of SFA in Korea. The purpose of this study is to investigate the utilization of SFA system and the non - financial performance of SFA system. The subjects of the survey were 347 pharmaceutical community members who consisted of pharmaceutical salespeople and surveyed online for 18 days from March 13, 2018 to April 30, 2018. and the effective response rate was 23.1% (80/347). The analysis shows that the higher the level of SFA system utilization, the higher the non - financial performance. By type of company, the utilization level of multinational companies was higher than that of domestic companies. Among the SFA utilization level items, 1.47 points (3.65, 2.18) were higher than the domestic companies in terms of the support service items. Among the SFA performance items, foreign companies were 1.47 points (3.16, 1.69) Respectively. This suggests that the SFA development and operation method of the domestic company focuses on the management service rather than the support service for the salesperson and the customer satisfaction. Through this study, it is considered that domestic companies should strengthen sales person support and customer satisfaction information providing function when operating SFA system.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.93-113
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• 2021

Service orientation and customer orientation are recognized as important success factors in service companies. However, these constructs are evaluated through self-diagnosis within the service company based on service delivery experience. For this reason, Fintech companies that provide financial services based on non-face-to-face channels such as mobile APP have limitations in evaluating their service orientation and customer orientation. Therefore, in this study, the perceived customer orientation is conceptualized so that service orientation and customer orientation can be evaluated through customer evaluation. In addition, the antecedents and consequences of the perceived customer orientation based on the technology acceptance model were demonstrated. As a result, it was confirmed the mediating effect of perceived customer orientation in the relationship between perceived ease of use and usefulness and customer's continuous use intention and word of mouth intention. This study laid the foundation for the Fintech companies that provide all financial services throughout non-face-to-face to measure their service orientation and customer orientation through customer evaluation and utilize them in establishing service operation strategies.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Building Construction Conference
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• 2014.11a
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• pp.224-225
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• 2014

In recent years, the domestic construction business is continuously stagnated caused by housing depression, global financial crisis etc. To overcome these difficulties, the construction companies should reinforce the internal marketing like the service business. However, it is not easy to conduct active internal marketing reinforcement since the companies do not directly receive customers under special situation like construction. Therefore, it is necessary to resolve the urgent issue by selecting order of priority among internal marketing factors. To address this issue, the objective of this study is to analysis the internal marking factors by using Analytic Hierarchy Process.