• Title/Summary/Keyword: Industry Complex

Search Result 1,550, Processing Time 0.031 seconds

Studies on the Desertification Combating and Sand Industry Development(IV) - Technology Development for Sanddune Fixation and Sandy Land Conservation in China - (사막화방지(沙漠化防止) 및 방사기술개발(防沙技術開發)에 관한 연구(硏究)(IV) - 중국(中國)의 사구고정(沙丘固定) 및 방사공법분석(防沙工法分析) -)

  • Woo, Bo-Myeong;Lee, Kyung-Joon;Choi, Hyung-Tae;Lee, Sang-Ho;Park, Joo-Won;Wang, Lixian;Zhang, Kebin;Sun, Baoping
    • Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
    • /
    • v.90 no.3
    • /
    • pp.277-294
    • /
    • 2001
  • This study is aimed to analyze and to evaluate the technology development for sanddune fixation and sandy land conservation in China, resulting from the project of "Studies on the desertification combating and sand industry development". There are various types of sanddunes, including shrub-bunch type, dendritic, honey combed lattice, crescentic, parabolic, pyramid, complex and irregular types, domed, and so on. The height distribution ratios of these sanddunes are 13% of less than 5m, 17% of 6~10m, 18% of 11~25m, 14% of 26~50m, 28% of 51~100m, 10% of more than 100m, and so on. In dry land of China, shifting direction of the sanddune is mainly varying with main direction of wind, but types of shifting sanddunes have many differences in accordance with region, topography, size and shape of sanddunes. The main sanddune fixation technologies could be divided into the bio-ecological measures, physical measures and chemical measures. The bio-ecological measures include such vegetation measures as shrub-grasses measures, sandbreaks between sand dunes, sand fixation shelterblets and establishment of farmland shelterbelts, etc. The physical measures include establishment of high-sanddune stabilization walls and low-sanddune stabilization walls, sanddune fixation levees and coverage method with sediment clay, etc. The chemical measures include fixation-materials spraying and synthetical liquid spraying methods, etc. Besides, irrigation and sand settlement measures, shifting sand trapping channel, ditchsand fixation measures, etc. have been effectively applied.

  • PDF

A Study on Act on Certified Detective and Certified Detective Business (공인탐정 관련 법률(안)의 문제점과 개선방안에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Bong-Soo;Choo, Bong-Jo
    • Korean Security Journal
    • /
    • no.61
    • /
    • pp.285-305
    • /
    • 2019
  • In the bill of [Act on Certified Detective and Certified Detective Business] (hereinafter referred to as the Certified Detective Act) proposed and represented by the member of National Assembly, Lee Wan-Yong in 2017, the legislative point of view showed that various incidents and accidents, including new crimes, are frequently increasing as society develops and becomes more complex, however, it is not possible to solve all the incidents and accidents with the investigation force of the state alone due to manpower and budget, and therefore, a certified detective or private investigator are required. According to the decision of the Constitutional Court in June 2018, Article 40 (4) of the Act on the Use and Protection of Credit Information is concerned with 'finding the location and contact information of a specific person or investigating privacy other than commerce relations such as financial transactions' are prohibited. It is for the purpose of preventing illegal acts in the process of investigation such as the location, contact information, and the privacy of a specific person and protecting the privacy and tranquility of personal privacy from misuse and abuse of the personal information etc. Such 'privacy investigation business' currently operates in the form of self-employment business, which becomes a social issue as some companies illegally collect and provide such privacy information by using illegal cameras or vehicle location trackers and also comes to be the objects of clampdown of the investigative agency. Considering this reality, because it is difficult to find a resolution to materialize the legislative purpose of the Act on the use and protection of credit information other than prohibiting 'investigation business including privacy etc' and it is possible to run a similar type of business as a detective business in the scope that the laws of credit research business, security service business, the position of the Constitutional Court is that 'the ban on the investigations of privacy etc' does not infringe the claimant's freedom to choose a job. In addition to this decision, the precedent positions of the Constitutional Court have been that, in principle, the legislative regulation of a particular occupation was a matter of legislative policy determined by the legislator's political, economic and social considerations, unless otherwise there were any special circumstances, and. the Constitutional Court also widely recognized the legislative formation rights of legislators in the qualifications system related to the freedom of a job. In this regard, this study examines the problems and improvement plans of the certified detective system, focusing on the certified detective bill recently under discussion, and tries to establish a legal basis for the certified detective and certified detective business, in order to cultivate and institutionalize the certified detective business, and to suggest methodologies to seek for the development of the businesses and protect the rights of the people.

Predicting stock movements based on financial news with systematic group identification (시스템적인 군집 확인과 뉴스를 이용한 주가 예측)

  • Seong, NohYoon;Nam, Kihwan
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.25 no.3
    • /
    • pp.1-17
    • /
    • 2019
  • Because stock price forecasting is an important issue both academically and practically, research in stock price prediction has been actively conducted. The stock price forecasting research is classified into using structured data and using unstructured data. With structured data such as historical stock price and financial statements, past studies usually used technical analysis approach and fundamental analysis. In the big data era, the amount of information has rapidly increased, and the artificial intelligence methodology that can find meaning by quantifying string information, which is an unstructured data that takes up a large amount of information, has developed rapidly. With these developments, many attempts with unstructured data are being made to predict stock prices through online news by applying text mining to stock price forecasts. The stock price prediction methodology adopted in many papers is to forecast stock prices with the news of the target companies to be forecasted. However, according to previous research, not only news of a target company affects its stock price, but news of companies that are related to the company can also affect the stock price. However, finding a highly relevant company is not easy because of the market-wide impact and random signs. Thus, existing studies have found highly relevant companies based primarily on pre-determined international industry classification standards. However, according to recent research, global industry classification standard has different homogeneity within the sectors, and it leads to a limitation that forecasting stock prices by taking them all together without considering only relevant companies can adversely affect predictive performance. To overcome the limitation, we first used random matrix theory with text mining for stock prediction. Wherever the dimension of data is large, the classical limit theorems are no longer suitable, because the statistical efficiency will be reduced. Therefore, a simple correlation analysis in the financial market does not mean the true correlation. To solve the issue, we adopt random matrix theory, which is mainly used in econophysics, to remove market-wide effects and random signals and find a true correlation between companies. With the true correlation, we perform cluster analysis to find relevant companies. Also, based on the clustering analysis, we used multiple kernel learning algorithm, which is an ensemble of support vector machine to incorporate the effects of the target firm and its relevant firms simultaneously. Each kernel was assigned to predict stock prices with features of financial news of the target firm and its relevant firms. The results of this study are as follows. The results of this paper are as follows. (1) Following the existing research flow, we confirmed that it is an effective way to forecast stock prices using news from relevant companies. (2) When looking for a relevant company, looking for it in the wrong way can lower AI prediction performance. (3) The proposed approach with random matrix theory shows better performance than previous studies if cluster analysis is performed based on the true correlation by removing market-wide effects and random signals. The contribution of this study is as follows. First, this study shows that random matrix theory, which is used mainly in economic physics, can be combined with artificial intelligence to produce good methodologies. This suggests that it is important not only to develop AI algorithms but also to adopt physics theory. This extends the existing research that presented the methodology by integrating artificial intelligence with complex system theory through transfer entropy. Second, this study stressed that finding the right companies in the stock market is an important issue. This suggests that it is not only important to study artificial intelligence algorithms, but how to theoretically adjust the input values. Third, we confirmed that firms classified as Global Industrial Classification Standard (GICS) might have low relevance and suggested it is necessary to theoretically define the relevance rather than simply finding it in the GICS.

A Study on the Determinants of Demand for Visiting Department Stores Using Big Data (POS) (빅데이터(POS)를 활용한 백화점 방문수요 결정요인에 관한 연구)

  • Shin, Seong Youn;Park, Jung A
    • Land and Housing Review
    • /
    • v.13 no.4
    • /
    • pp.55-71
    • /
    • 2022
  • Recently, the domestic department store industry is growing into a complex shopping cultural space, which is advanced and differentiated by changes in consumption patterns. In addition, competition is intensifying across 70 places operated by five large companies. This study investigates the determinants of the visits to department stores using the big data concept's automatic vehicle access system (pos) and proposes how to strengthen the competitiveness of the department store industry. We use a negative binomial regression test to predict the frequency of visits to 67 branches, except for three branches whose annual sales were incomplete due to the new opening in 2021. The results show that the demand for visiting department stores is positively associated with airport, terminal, and train stations, land areas, parking lots, VIP lounge numbers, luxury store ratio, F&B store numbers, non-commercial areas, and hotels. We suggest four strategies to enhance the competitiveness of domestic department stores. First, department store consumers have a high preference for luxury brands. Therefore, department stores need to form their own overseas buyer teams to discover and attract new luxury brands and attract customers who have a high demand for luxury brands. In addition, to attract consumers with high purchasing power and loyalty, it is necessary to provide more differentiated products and services for VIP customers than before. Second, it is desirable to focus on transportation hub areas such as train stations, airports, and terminals in Gyeonggi and Incheon. Third, department stores should attract tenants who can satisfy customers, given that key tenants are an important component of advanced shopping centers for department stores. Finally, the department store, a top-end shopping center, should be developed as a space with differentiated shopping, culture, dining out, and leisure services, such as "The Hyundai", which opened in 2021, to ensure future growth potential.

Narrative Structure and Ludonarrative Dissonance in the Video Game, "Red Dead Redemption 2" (<레드 데드 리뎀션 2>의 서사 형식과 서사 부조화)

  • Chun, Bum-Sue
    • Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
    • /
    • v.14 no.5
    • /
    • pp.59-72
    • /
    • 2020
  • Video games have become a powerful tool to tell a complex story realistically thanks to modern technology. Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), is a video game title that touts cinematic qualities such as superb acting by the voice actors and jaw-dropping cinematography as well as a rich narrative following the protagonist, Arthur Morgan's quest for redemption. Using Aristotle's Poetics and Robert Mckee's Aristotelian theory on storytelling, this study highlights Arthur's gradual change from a ruthless gunman to an altruistic hero, from which it derives the theme of redemption, and his super-objective to protect those he cares about. Then, it also explains a variety of possibilities in the narrative of the game determined by the opened-ended game mechanics, particularly the "honor" system, which reflects Arthur's moral choices on the narrative presentation with different sets of dialogue and endings. However, the study ultimately argues Red Dead Redemption 2 to be incohesive in its storytelling due to "ludonarrative dissonance," a concept coined by Clint Hocking, which indicates a conflict between the narrative and game mechanics of a video game. It's mainly because the game's various narrative choices bring changes to neither the theme nor Arthur's super-objective. Furthermore, the double-standard of evaluation in the "honor" system, and its numeric ranking system of honor also lend themselves to ludonarrative dissonance even further. After all, the study ultimately claims ludonarrative dissonance in Red Dead Redemption essentially disrupts the game's narrative unity, which is Aristotle's one of most emphasized upon traits of any story and signifies the game's instability as a storytelling medium.

A Study on the Structural Model and Relation of will to Happy Life (행복한 삶을 위한 의지의 구조모델과 관계성 연구)

  • Jeong, Cheol-Yeong
    • Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
    • /
    • v.13 no.3
    • /
    • pp.213-220
    • /
    • 2019
  • Desire for a happy life becomes the will that man instinctively desires. In that the conditions of happiness are subjective and varied, the will of subjective desires has been studied with the attention of objective tendencies. The positive and meaningful will of life in the desire for happiness leads us to be the functionaries who act. These wills can be the driving force of a happy life, which allows one to have a hopeful reflective will in one's inner life, connecting oneself with others, and working in relationships with others. In addition, those who become lazy or lose their orientation in life can instill a will to be the main character of life, and furthermore, to give the ultimate meaning and goals of life. To understand and analyze these wills for happy lives more specifically, structural model compatibility and confirmatory factors were conducted. relatively reliable α=.855 value, the coefficient of correlation between recognition and will **p<.01, *p<.05 statistically significant measuring tool of not less than 05 was used. The study results of the structural model suitability of the factors of will and the confirmatory factor analysis showed that the model set by the researcher could reflect the characteristics of the data collected, and that the χ2(Chi-square) value was .126, which was consistent with the model by satisfying the acceptance criteria, and that the comparison of the reference values of the study model showed a relatively high level of suitability. To identify the relationship between cognitive and defined and behavioral factors of subjective will and existent will variables, the results of a verification factor analysis show that the χ2(Chi-square) value is 2.36 and the model and data are consistent with the acceptance criteria, and that the test data is consistent with the model and data set by the researcher are consistent with the model5.0 Through structural model analysis of human will, it was confirmed that the variables of subjective and existential, sensible and reflective will directly and indirectly influence and form a complex relationship. Our will is recognized as the subjective will, and the structure of the subjective will consists of the sensible and reflective will, and the relationship between the cognitive and just action elements and the subjective will of the human life and the will to exist is shown to be very meaningful, so we should conduct the education of the happy will of the emotional and just areas of life as well as the reestablishment of the cognitive educational direction that can lead to action.

Development of Plant BIM Library according to Object Geometry and Attribute Information Guidelines (객체 형상 및 속성정보 지침에 따른 수목 BIM 라이브러리 개발)

  • Kim, Bok-Young
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
    • /
    • v.52 no.2
    • /
    • pp.51-63
    • /
    • 2024
  • While the government policy to fully adopt BIM in the construction sector is being implemented, the construction and utilization of landscape BIM models are facing challenges due to problems such as limitations in BIM authoring tools, difficulties in modeling natural materials, and a shortage in BIM content including libraries. In particular, plants, fundamental design elements in the field of landscape architecture, must be included in BIM models, yet they are often omitted during the modeling process, or necessary information is not included, which further compromises the quality of the BIM data. This study aimed to contribute to the construction and utilization of landscape BIM models by developing a plant library that complies with BIM standards and is applicable to the landscape industry. The plant library of trees and shrubs was developed in Revit by modeling 3D shapes and collecting attribute items. The geometric information is simplified to express the unique characteristics of each plant species at LOD200, LOD300, and LOD350 levels. The attribute information includes properties on plant species identification, such as species name, specifications, and quantity estimation, as well as ecological attributes and environmental performance information, totaling 24 items. The names of the files were given so that the hierarchy of an object in the landscape field could be revealed and the object name could classify the plant itself. Its usability was examined by building a landscape BIM model of an apartment complex. The result showed that the plant library facilitated the construction process of the landscape BIM model. It was also confirmed that the library was properly operated in the basic utilization of the BIM model, such as 2D documentation, quantity takeoff, and design review. However, the library lacked ground cover, and had limitations in those variables such as the environmental performance of plants because various databases for some materials have not yet been established. Further efforts are needed to develop BIM modeling tools, techniques, and various databases for natural materials. Moreover, entities and systems responsible for creating, managing, distributing, and disseminating BIM libraries must be established.

Critical Success Factor of Noble Payment System: Multiple Case Studies (새로운 결제서비스의 성공요인: 다중사례연구)

  • Park, Arum;Lee, Kyoung Jun
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.20 no.4
    • /
    • pp.59-87
    • /
    • 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.

Visualizing the Results of Opinion Mining from Social Media Contents: Case Study of a Noodle Company (소셜미디어 콘텐츠의 오피니언 마이닝결과 시각화: N라면 사례 분석 연구)

  • Kim, Yoosin;Kwon, Do Young;Jeong, Seung Ryul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.20 no.4
    • /
    • pp.89-105
    • /
    • 2014
  • After emergence of Internet, social media with highly interactive Web 2.0 applications has provided very user friendly means for consumers and companies to communicate with each other. Users have routinely published contents involving their opinions and interests in social media such as blogs, forums, chatting rooms, and discussion boards, and the contents are released real-time in the Internet. For that reason, many researchers and marketers regard social media contents as the source of information for business analytics to develop business insights, and many studies have reported results on mining business intelligence from Social media content. In particular, opinion mining and sentiment analysis, as a technique to extract, classify, understand, and assess the opinions implicit in text contents, are frequently applied into social media content analysis because it emphasizes determining sentiment polarity and extracting authors' opinions. A number of frameworks, methods, techniques and tools have been presented by these researchers. However, we have found some weaknesses from their methods which are often technically complicated and are not sufficiently user-friendly for helping business decisions and planning. In this study, we attempted to formulate a more comprehensive and practical approach to conduct opinion mining with visual deliverables. First, we described the entire cycle of practical opinion mining using Social media content from the initial data gathering stage to the final presentation session. Our proposed approach to opinion mining consists of four phases: collecting, qualifying, analyzing, and visualizing. In the first phase, analysts have to choose target social media. Each target media requires different ways for analysts to gain access. There are open-API, searching tools, DB2DB interface, purchasing contents, and so son. Second phase is pre-processing to generate useful materials for meaningful analysis. If we do not remove garbage data, results of social media analysis will not provide meaningful and useful business insights. To clean social media data, natural language processing techniques should be applied. The next step is the opinion mining phase where the cleansed social media content set is to be analyzed. The qualified data set includes not only user-generated contents but also content identification information such as creation date, author name, user id, content id, hit counts, review or reply, favorite, etc. Depending on the purpose of the analysis, researchers or data analysts can select a suitable mining tool. Topic extraction and buzz analysis are usually related to market trends analysis, while sentiment analysis is utilized to conduct reputation analysis. There are also various applications, such as stock prediction, product recommendation, sales forecasting, and so on. The last phase is visualization and presentation of analysis results. The major focus and purpose of this phase are to explain results of analysis and help users to comprehend its meaning. Therefore, to the extent possible, deliverables from this phase should be made simple, clear and easy to understand, rather than complex and flashy. To illustrate our approach, we conducted a case study on a leading Korean instant noodle company. We targeted the leading company, NS Food, with 66.5% of market share; the firm has kept No. 1 position in the Korean "Ramen" business for several decades. We collected a total of 11,869 pieces of contents including blogs, forum contents and news articles. After collecting social media content data, we generated instant noodle business specific language resources for data manipulation and analysis using natural language processing. In addition, we tried to classify contents in more detail categories such as marketing features, environment, reputation, etc. In those phase, we used free ware software programs such as TM, KoNLP, ggplot2 and plyr packages in R project. As the result, we presented several useful visualization outputs like domain specific lexicons, volume and sentiment graphs, topic word cloud, heat maps, valence tree map, and other visualized images to provide vivid, full-colored examples using open library software packages of the R project. Business actors can quickly detect areas by a swift glance that are weak, strong, positive, negative, quiet or loud. Heat map is able to explain movement of sentiment or volume in categories and time matrix which shows density of color on time periods. Valence tree map, one of the most comprehensive and holistic visualization models, should be very helpful for analysts and decision makers to quickly understand the "big picture" business situation with a hierarchical structure since tree-map can present buzz volume and sentiment with a visualized result in a certain period. This case study offers real-world business insights from market sensing which would demonstrate to practical-minded business users how they can use these types of results for timely decision making in response to on-going changes in the market. We believe our approach can provide practical and reliable guide to opinion mining with visualized results that are immediately useful, not just in food industry but in other industries as well.

A New Exploratory Research on Franchisor's Provision of Exclusive Territories (가맹본부의 배타적 영업지역보호에 대한 탐색적 연구)

  • Lim, Young-Kyun;Lee, Su-Dong;Kim, Ju-Young
    • Journal of Distribution Research
    • /
    • v.17 no.1
    • /
    • pp.37-63
    • /
    • 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.

  • PDF