• Title/Summary/Keyword: Practical usage

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A Study on Environmental Traits and Significance of Eouidongji Pond(於義洞池) Area in Dongchon(東村), Hanseong-bu(漢城府) (한성부 동촌(東村) 어의동지(於義洞池) 일대의 환경 특성과 장소적 의미)

  • Gil, Ji-Hye;Son, Yong-Hoon;Hwang, Kee-Won
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Traditional Landscape Architecture
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    • v.35 no.2
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    • pp.1-14
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    • 2017
  • The purpose of this study is to understand the environmental traits and significance of the pond place that appears in historic maps in 'Dongchon(東村)', which is the eastern section within the fortress wall of Hanyang. We reviewed various documents and maps to identify the name of the pond, and of those materials we followed the name provided by official national records and geographical titles to designate it 'Eouidongji Pond(於義洞池).' The results of the research showed, first, that from the standpoint of location and environmental characteristics, that the area of the Eouidongji Pond was an area that contained a pastoral atmosphere within the city. It was located in an area where the waters flowing from the mountains gathered, and the boundaries of the pond would change based on water levels within a plot of land about 2,000pyeong(app. $6,600m^2$) in size. Second, when seen from the perspective of its creation background, the Eouidongji Pond seems to have been a naturally occurring pond which was modified when the water system was managed in the city at the beginning of the dynasty. In addition to its role as a reservoir, it was operated as a lotus pond(蓮池) to offer lotus(蓮) related by-products. With the nearby detached palace being actively used, it seems the pond was managed at the same time. The pond had already been filled in by the early 20th century, and although there were efforts to reconstruct the pond, it was eventually destroyed as the area was included in the site of a school during the colonial period. Third, the Eouidongji Pond was appreciated in many cases by individuals or admired as part of the natural landscape by viewing it from afar. In addition, it provided entry landscape near the road entering Dongchon, and was a location that was easily visited in connection with other nearby pleasure grounds. Through studying the location and environmental characteristics, the background of its creation and destruction, operation and management by time period, usage at the time, and characteristics of scenery appreciation of Eouidongji Pond, the Eouidongji Pond was a pond of high practical value to the nation, as it supplemented the water system in the city and was able to provide lotus harvests for the nation. In addition, from a urban environment perspective, it was a lateral landmark with a large area, as well as an effective boundary. It was an open area that the people of the Hanseong-bu could freely use, and it had a high public value due to its ease of accessibility.

Market Structure Analysis of Automobile Market in U.S.A (미국자동차시장의 구조분석)

  • Choi, In-Hye;Lee, Seo-Goo;Yi, Seong-Keun
    • Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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    • v.18 no.1
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    • pp.141-156
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    • 2008
  • Market structure analysis is a very useful tool to analyze the competition boundary of the brand or the company. But most of the studies in market structure analysis, the concern lies in nondurable goods such as candies, soft drink and etc. because of the their availability of the data. In the field of durable goods, the limitation of the data availability and the repurchase time period constrain the study. In the analysis of the automobile market, those of views might be more persuasive. The purpose of this study is to analyze the structure of automobile market based on some idea suggested by prior studies. Usually the buyers of the automobile tend to buy upper tier when they buy in the next time. That kind of behavior make it impossible to analyze the structure of automobile market under the level of automobile model. For that reason I tried to analyze the market structure in the brand or company level. In this study, consideration data was used for market structure analysis. The reasons why we used the consideration data are summarized as following. Firstly, as the repurchase time cycle is too long, brand switching data which is used for the market analysis of nondurable good is not avaliable. Secondly, as we mentioned, the buyers of the automobile tend to buy upper tier when they buy in the next time. We used survey data collected in the U.S.A. market in the year of 2005 through questionaire. The sample size was 8,291. The number of brand analyzed in this study was 9 among 37 which was being sold in U.S.A. market. Their market share was around 50%. The brands considered were BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, Honda, Mercedes, and Toyota. �� ratio was derived from frequency of the consideration set. Actually the frequency is different from the brand switch concept. In this study to compute the �� ratio, the frequency of the consideration set was used like a frequency of brand switch for convenience. The study can be divided into 2 steps. The first step is to build hypothetical market structures. The second step is to choose the best structure based on the hypothetical market structures, Usually logit analysis is used for the choice best structure. In this study we built 3 hypothetical market structure. They are type-cost, cost-type, and unstructured. We classified the automobile into 5 types, sedan, SUV(Sport Utility Vehicle), Pickup, Mini Van, and Full-size Van. As for purchasing cost, we classified it 2 groups based on the median value. The median value was $28,800. To decide best structure among them, maximum likelihood test was used. Resulting from market structure analysis, we find that the automobile market of USA is hierarchically structured in the form of 'automobile type - purchasing cost'. That is, result showed that automobile buyers considered function or usage first and purchasing cost next. This study has some limitations in the analysis level and variable selection. First, in this study only type of the automobile and purchasing cost were as attributes considered for purchase. Considering other attributes is very needful. Because of the attributes considered, only 3 hypothetical structure could be analyzed. Second, due to the data, brand level analysis was tried. But model level analysis would be better because automobile buyers consider model not brand. To conduct model level study more cases should be obtained. That is for acquiring the better practical meaning, brand level analysis should be conducted when we consider the actual competition which occurred in the real market. Third, the variable selection for building nested logit model was very limited to some avaliable data. In spite of those limitations, the importance of this study lies in the trial of market structure analysis of durable good.

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The Effect of the Subjective Wellbeing on the Addiction and Usage Motivation of Social Networking Services: Moderating Effect of Social Tie (SNS 이용동기와 SNS 중독이 주관적 웰빙에 미치는 영향: 사회적 유대감의 조절효과)

  • Noh, Mi-Jin;Jang, Sung-Hee
    • Management & Information Systems Review
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    • v.35 no.4
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    • pp.99-122
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    • 2016
  • The social networking services (SNSs) have become popular among smartphone users, and one of the most popular services. In order to explain users' motivations toward SNS, this study considers uses and gratification theory which can explain individuals' motivations to select certain media channels. The purposes of this study is to investigate the relationships between motivations and addiction of SNS, and between addiction of SNS and decline in the subjective wellbeing. We examine moderating effects of social tie based on the social capital theory in the relationships between SNS addiction and decline in the subjective wellbeing. The motivations of SNS are subdivided into emotional motive (entertainment and fantasy) and cognitive motive (information share burden and challenge burden) based on the use and gratifications theory. The addiction of SNS is subdivided into time tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, interruption, and barrier of living. The data used in this study were collected from 286 SNS users through surveys. The data analysis in this study was performed using AMOS 17.0, and we used SEM(Structural Equation Modeling) methods in order to test the research model. The result shows that the emotional motive(entertainment and fantasy) and cognitive motive(information share burden and challenge burden) have an effect on the addiction of SNS. Especially emotional motive such as entertainment and users' fantasy toward SNS is an important factor that can cause SNS addiction. The addiction of SNS such as time tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, interruption, and barrier of living has an effect on the decline in the subjective wellbeing. Our result show that social tie partially moderates the relationship SNS addiction and decline in the subjective wellbeing. In addition, social tie between interruption of SNS and decline in the subjective wellbeing is an important moderating factor. The results focuses on the understanding toward relationship between SNS addiction based on the online and decline in the subjective wellbeing in the real world. The findings of this study also provides theoretical as well as practical implications which reflect the major features of SNS, and moderating effects of social tie based on the social capital.

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A Study on Design of Agent based Nursing Records System in Attending System (에이전트기반 개방병원 간호기록시스템 설계에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Kyoung-Hwan
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.16 no.2
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    • pp.73-94
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    • 2010
  • The attending system is a medical system that allows doctors in clinics to use the extra equipment in hospitals-beds, laboratory, operating room, etc-for their patient's care under a contract between the doctors and hospitals. Therefore, the system is very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of the usage of medical resources. However, it is necessary to develop a strong support system to strengthen its weaknesses and supplement its merits. If doctors use hospital beds under the attending system of hospitals, they would be able to check a patient's condition often and provide them with nursing care services. However, the current attending system lacks delivery and assistance support. Thus, for the successful performance of the attending system, a networking system should be developed to facilitate communication between the doctors and nurses. In particular, the nursing records in the attending system could help doctors monitor the patient's condition and provision of nursing care services. A nursing record is the formal documentation associated with nursing care. It is merely a data repository that helps nurses to track their activities; nursing records thus represent a resource of primary information that can be reused. In order to maximize their usefulness, nursing records have been introduced as part of computerized patient records. However, nursing records are internal data that are not disclosed by hospitals. Moreover, the lack of standardization of the record list makes it difficult to share nursing records. Under the attending system, nurses would want to minimize the amount of effort they have to put in for the maintenance of additional records. Hence, they would try to maintain the current level of nursing records in the form of record lists and record attributes, while doctors would require more detailed and real-time information about their patients in order to monitor their condition. Therefore, this study developed a system for assisting in the maintenance and sharing of the nursing records under the attending system. In contrast to previous research on the functionality of computer-based nursing records, we have emphasized the practical usefulness of nursing records from the viewpoint of the actual implementation of the attending system. We suggested that nurses could design a nursing record dictionary for their convenience, and that doctors and nurses could confirm the definitions that they looked up in the dictionary through negotiations with intelligent agents. Such an agent-based system could facilitate networking among medical institutes. Multi-agent systems are a widely accepted paradigm for the distribution and sharing of computation workloads in the scientific community. Agent-based systems have been developed with differences in functional cooperation, coordination, and negotiation. To increase such communication, a framework for a multi-agent based system is proposed in this study. The agent-based approach is useful for developing a system that promotes trade-offs between transactions involving multiple attributes. A brief summary of our contributions follows. First, we propose an efficient and accurate utility representation and acquisition mechanism based on a preference scale while minimizing user interactions with the agent. Trade-offs between various transaction attributes can also be easily computed. Second, by providing a multi-attribute negotiation framework based on the attribute utility evaluation mechanism, we allow both the doctors in charge and nurses to negotiate over various transaction attributes in the nursing record lists that are defined by the latter. Third, we have designed the architecture of the nursing record management server and a system of agents that provides support to the doctors and nurses with regard to the framework and mechanisms proposed above. A formal protocol has also been developed to create and control the communication required for negotiations. We verified the realization of the system by developing a web-based prototype. The system was implemented using ASP and IIS5.1.

Effects of Storytelling in Advertising on Consumers' Empathy

  • Park, Myungjin;Lee, Doo-Hee
    • Asia Marketing Journal
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    • v.15 no.4
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    • pp.103-129
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    • 2014
  • Differentiated positioning becomes increasingly difficult when brand salience weakens. Also, the daily increase in new media use and information load has led to a social climate that regards advertising stimuli as spamming. For these reasons, the focus of advertisement-related communication is shifting from persuading consumers through the direct delivery of information to an emphasis on appealing to their emotions using matching stimuli to enhance persuasion effects. Recently, both academia and industry have increasingly shown an interest in storytelling methods that can generate positive emotional responses and attitude changes by arousing consumers' narrative processing. The purpose of storytelling is to elicit consumers' emotional experience to meet the objectives of advertisement producers. Therefore, the most important requirement for storytelling in advertising is that it evokes consumers' sympathy for the main character in the advertisement. This does not involve advertisements directly persuading consumers, but rather, consumers themselves finding an answer through the advertisement's story. Thus, consumers have an indirect experience regarding the product features and usage through empathy with the advertisement's main character. In this study, we took the results of a precedent study as the starting point, according to which consumers' emotional response can be altered depending on the storytelling methods adopted for storytelling ads. Previous studies have reported that drama-type and vignette-type storytelling methods have a considerably different impact on the emotional responses of advertising audiences, due to their different structural characteristics. Thus, this study aims to verify that emotional response aroused by different types of advertisement storytelling (drama ads vs. vignette ads) can be controlled by the socio-psychological gender difference of advertising audiences and that the interaction effects between the socio-psychological gender differences of the audience and the gender stereotype of emotions to which advertisements appeal can exert an influence on emotional responses to types of storytelling in advertising. To achieve this, an experiment was conducted employing a between-group design consisting of 2 (storytelling type: drama ads vs. vignette ads) × 2 (socio-psychological gender of the audience: masculinity vs. femininity) × 2 (advertising appeal emotion type: male stereotype emotion vs. female stereotype emotion). The experiment revealed that the femininity group displayed a strong and consistent empathy for drama ads regardless of whether the ads appealed to masculine or feminine emotions, whereas the masculinity group displayed a stronger empathy for drama ads appealing to the emotional types matching its own gender as well as for vignette ads. The theoretical contribution of this study is significant in that it sheds light on the controllability of the audiences' emotional responses to advertisement storytelling depending on their socio-psychological gender and gender stereotype of emotions appealed to through advertising. Specifically, its considerable practical contribution consists in easing unnecessary creative constraints by comprehensively analyzing essential advertising strategic factors such as the target consumers' gender and the objective of the advertisement, in contrast to the oversimplified view of previous studies that considered emotional responses to storytelling ads were determined by the different types of production techniques used. This study revealed that emotional response to advertisement storytelling varies depending on the target gender of and emotion type appealed to by the advertisement. This suggests that an understanding of the targeted gender is necessary prior to producing an advertisement and that in deciding on an advertisement storytelling type, strategic attention should be directed to the advertisement's appeal concept or emotion type. Thus, it is safe to use drama-type storytelling that expresses masculine emotions (ex. fun, happy, encouraged) when the advertisement target, like Bacchus, includes both men and women. For brands and advertisements targeting only women (ex. female clothes), it is more effective to use a drama-type storytelling method that expresses feminine emotions (lovely, romantic, sad). The drama method can be still more effective than the vignette when women are the main target and a masculine concept-based creative is to be produced. However, when male consumers are targeted and the brand concept or advertisement concept is focused on feminine emotions (ex. romantic), vignette ads can more effectively induce empathy than drama ads.

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The Impacts of Need for Cognitive Closure, Psychological Wellbeing, and Social Factors on Impulse Purchasing (인지폐합수요(认知闭合需要), 심리건강화사회인소대충동구매적영향(心理健康和社会因素对冲动购买的影响))

  • Lee, Myong-Han;Schellhase, Ralf;Koo, Dong-Mo;Lee, Mi-Jeong
    • Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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    • v.19 no.4
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    • pp.44-56
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    • 2009
  • Impulse purchasing is defined as an immediate purchase with no pre-shopping intentions. Previous studies of impulse buying have focused primarily on factors linked to marketing mix variables, situational factors, and consumer demographics and traits. In previous studies, marketing mix variables such as product category, product type, and atmospheric factors including advertising, coupons, sales events, promotional stimuli at the point of sale, and media format have been used to evaluate product information. Some authors have also focused on situational factors surrounding the consumer. Factors such as the availability of credit card usage, time available, transportability of the products, and the presence and number of shopping companions were found to have a positive impact on impulse buying and/or impulse tendency. Research has also been conducted to evaluate the effects of individual characteristics such as the age, gender, and educational level of the consumer, as well as perceived crowding, stimulation, and the need for touch, on impulse purchasing. In summary, previous studies have found that all products can be purchased impulsively (Vohs and Faber, 2007), that situational factors affect and/or at least facilitate impulse purchasing behavior, and that various individual traits are closely linked to impulse buying. The recent introduction of new distribution channels such as home shopping channels, discount stores, and Internet stores that are open 24 hours a day increases the probability of impulse purchasing. However, previous literature has focused predominantly on situational and marketing variables and thus studies that consider critical consumer characteristics are still lacking. To fill this gap in the literature, the present study builds on this third tradition of research and focuses on individual trait variables, which have rarely been studied. More specifically, the current study investigates whether impulse buying tendency has a positive impact on impulse buying behavior, and evaluates how consumer characteristics such as the need for cognitive closure (NFCC), psychological wellbeing, and susceptibility to interpersonal influences affect the tendency of consumers towards impulse buying. The survey results reveal that while consumer affective impulsivity has a strong positive impact on impulse buying behavior, cognitive impulsivity has no impact on impulse buying behavior. Furthermore, affective impulse buying tendency is driven by sub-components of NFCC such as decisiveness and discomfort with ambiguity, psychological wellbeing constructs such as environmental control and purpose in life, and by normative and informational influences. In addition, cognitive impulse tendency is driven by sub-components of NFCC such as decisiveness, discomfort with ambiguity, and close-mindedness, and the psychological wellbeing constructs of environmental control, as well as normative and informational influences. The present study has significant theoretical implications. First, affective impulsivity has a strong impact on impulse purchase behavior. Previous studies based on affectivity and flow theories proposed that low to moderate levels of impulsivity are driven by reduced self-control or a failure of self-regulatory mechanisms. The present study confirms the above proposition. Second, the present study also contributes to the literature by confirming that impulse buying tendency can be viewed as a two-dimensional concept with both affective and cognitive dimensions, and illustrates that impulse purchase behavior is explained mainly by affective impulsivity, not by cognitive impulsivity. Third, the current study accommodates new constructs such as psychological wellbeing and NFCC as potential influencing factors in the research model, thereby contributing to the existing literature. Fourth, by incorporating multi-dimensional concepts such as psychological wellbeing and NFCC, more diverse aspects of consumer information processing can be evaluated. Fifth, the current study also extends the existing literature by confirming the two competing routes of normative and informational influences. Normative influence occurs when individuals conform to the expectations of others or to enhance his/her self-image. Whereas informational influence occurs when individuals search for information from knowledgeable others or making inferences based upon observations of the behavior of others. The present study shows that these two competing routes of social influence can be attributed to different sources of influence power. The current study also has many practical implications. First, it suggests that people with affective impulsivity may be primary targets to whom companies should pay closer attention. Cultivating a more amenable and mood-elevating shopping environment will appeal to this segment. Second, the present results demonstrate that NFCC is closely related to the cognitive dimension of impulsivity. These people are driven by careless thoughts, not by feelings or excitement. Rational advertising at the point of purchase will attract these customers. Third, people susceptible to normative influences are another potential target market. Retailers and manufacturers could appeal to this segment by advertising their products and/or services as products that can be used to identify with or conform to the expectations of others in the aspiration group. However, retailers should avoid targeting people susceptible to informational influences as a segment market. These people are engaged in an extensive information search relevant to their purchase, and therefore more elaborate, long-term rational advertising messages, which can be internalized into these consumers' thought processes, will appeal to this segment. The current findings should be interpreted with caution for several reasons. The study used a small convenience sample, and only investigated behavior in two dimensions. Accordingly, future studies should incorporate a sample with more diverse characteristics and measure different aspects of behavior. Future studies should also investigate personality traits closely related to affectivity theories. Trait variables such as sensory curiosity, interpersonal curiosity, and atmospheric responsiveness are interesting areas for future investigation.

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An Analysis of the Comparative Importance of Systematic Attributes for Developing an Intelligent Online News Recommendation System: Focusing on the PWYW Payment Model (지능형 온라인 뉴스 추천시스템 개발을 위한 체계적 속성간 상대적 중요성 분석: PWYW 지불모델을 중심으로)

  • Lee, Hyoung-Joo;Chung, Nuree;Yang, Sung-Byung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.1
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    • pp.75-100
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    • 2018
  • Mobile devices have become an important channel for news content usage in our daily life. However, online news content readers' resistance to online news monetization is more serious than other digital content businesses, such as webtoons, music sources, videos, and games. Since major portal sites distribute online news content free of charge to increase their traffics, customers have been accustomed to free news content; hence this makes online news providers more difficult to switch their policies on business models (i.e., monetization policy). As a result, most online news providers are highly dependent on the advertising business model, which can lead to increasing number of false, exaggerated, or sensational advertisements inside the news website to maximize their advertising revenue. To reduce this advertising dependencies, many online news providers had attempted to switch their 'free' readers to 'paid' users, but most of them failed. However, recently, some online news media have been successfully applying the Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) payment model, which allows readers to voluntarily pay fees for their favorite news content. These successful cases shed some lights to the managers of online news content provider regarding that the PWYW model can serve as an alternative business model. In this study, therefore, we collected 379 online news articles from Ohmynews.com that has been successfully employing the PWYW model, and analyzed the comparative importance of systematic attributes of online news content on readers' voluntary payment. More specifically, we derived the six systematic attributes (i.e., Type of Article Title, Image Stimulation, Article Readability, Article Type, Dominant Emotion, and Article-Image Similarity) and three or four levels within each attribute based on previous studies. Then, we conducted content analysis to measure five attributes except Article Readability attribute, measured by Flesch readability score. Before conducting main content analysis, the face reliabilities of chosen attributes were measured by three doctoral level researchers with 37 sample articles, and inter-coder reliabilities of the three coders were verified. Then, the main content analysis was conducted for two months from March 2017 with 379 online news articles. All 379 articles were reviewed by the same three coders, and 65 articles that showed inconsistency among coders were excluded before employing conjoint analysis. Finally, we examined the comparative importance of those six systematic attributes (Study 1), and levels within each of the six attributes (Study 2) through conjoint analysis with 314 online news articles. From the results of conjoint analysis, we found that Article Readability, Article-Image Similarity, and Type of Article Title are the most significant factors affecting online news readers' voluntary payment. First, it can be interpreted that if the level of readability of an online news article is in line with the readers' level of readership, the readers will voluntarily pay more. Second, the similarity between the content of the article and the image within it enables the readers to increase the information acceptance and to transmit the message of the article more effectively. Third, readers expect that the article title would reveal the content of the article, and the expectation influences the understanding and satisfaction of the article. Therefore, it is necessary to write an article with an appropriate readability level, and use images and title well matched with the content to make readers voluntarily pay more. We also examined the comparative importance of levels within each attribute in more details. Based on findings of two studies, two major and nine minor propositions are suggested for future empirical research. This study has academic implications in that it is one of the first studies applying both content analysis and conjoint analysis together to examine readers' voluntary payment behavior, rather than their intention to pay. In addition, online news content creators, providers, and managers could find some practical insights from this research in terms of how they should produce news content to make readers voluntarily pay more for their online news content.

How Enduring Product Involvement and Perceived Risk Affect Consumers' Online Merchant Selection Process: The 'Required Trust Level' Perspective (지속적 관여도 및 인지된 위험이 소비자의 온라인 상인선택 프로세스에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구: 요구신뢰 수준 개념을 중심으로)

  • Hong, Il-Yoo B.;Lee, Jung-Min;Cho, Hwi-Hyung
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.29-52
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    • 2012
  • Consumers differ in the way they make a purchase. An audio mania would willingly make a bold, yet serious, decision to buy a top-of-the-line home theater system, while he is not interested in replacing his two-decade-old shabby car. On the contrary, an automobile enthusiast wouldn't mind spending forty thousand dollars to buy a new Jaguar convertible, yet cares little about his junky component system. It is product involvement that helps us explain such differences among individuals in the purchase style. Product involvement refers to the extent to which a product is perceived to be important to a consumer (Zaichkowsky, 2001). Product involvement is an important factor that strongly influences consumer's purchase decision-making process, and thus has been of prime interest to consumer behavior researchers. Furthermore, researchers found that involvement is closely related to perceived risk (Dholakia, 2001). While abundant research exists addressing how product involvement relates to overall perceived risk, little attention has been paid to the relationship between involvement and different types of perceived risk in an electronic commerce setting. Given that perceived risk can be a substantial barrier to the online purchase (Jarvenpaa, 2000), research addressing such an issue will offer useful implications on what specific types of perceived risk an online firm should focus on mitigating if it is to increase sales to a fullest potential. Meanwhile, past research has focused on such consumer responses as information search and dissemination as a consequence of involvement, neglecting other behavioral responses like online merchant selection. For one example, will a consumer seriously considering the purchase of a pricey Guzzi bag perceive a great degree of risk associated with online buying and therefore choose to buy it from a digital storefront rather than from an online marketplace to mitigate risk? Will a consumer require greater trust on the part of the online merchant when the perceived risk of online buying is rather high? We intend to find answers to these research questions through an empirical study. This paper explores the impact of enduring product involvement and perceived risks on required trust level, and further on online merchant choice. For the purpose of the research, five types or components of perceived risk are taken into consideration, including financial, performance, delivery, psychological, and social risks. A research model has been built around the constructs under consideration, and 12 hypotheses have been developed based on the research model to examine the relationships between enduring involvement and five components of perceived risk, between five components of perceived risk and required trust level, between enduring involvement and required trust level, and finally between required trust level and preference toward an e-tailer. To attain our research objectives, we conducted an empirical analysis consisting of two phases of data collection: a pilot test and main survey. The pilot test was conducted using 25 college students to ensure that the questionnaire items are clear and straightforward. Then the main survey was conducted using 295 college students at a major university for nine days between December 13, 2010 and December 21, 2010. The measures employed to test the model included eight constructs: (1) enduring involvement, (2) financial risk, (3) performance risk, (4) delivery risk, (5) psychological risk, (6) social risk, (7) required trust level, (8) preference toward an e-tailer. The statistical package, SPSS 17.0, was used to test the internal consistency among the items within the individual measures. Based on the Cronbach's ${\alpha}$ coefficients of the individual measure, the reliability of all the variables is supported. Meanwhile, the Amos 18.0 package was employed to perform a confirmatory factor analysis designed to assess the unidimensionality of the measures. The goodness of fit for the measurement model was satisfied. Unidimensionality was tested using convergent, discriminant, and nomological validity. The statistical evidences proved that the three types of validity were all satisfied. Now the structured equation modeling technique was used to analyze the individual paths along the relationships among the research constructs. The results indicated that enduring involvement has significant positive relationships with all the five components of perceived risk, while only performance risk is significantly related to trust level required by consumers for purchase. It can be inferred from the findings that product performance problems are mostly likely to occur when a merchant behaves in an opportunistic manner. Positive relationships were also found between involvement and required trust level and between required trust level and online merchant choice. Enduring involvement is concerned with the pleasure a consumer derives from a product class and/or with the desire for knowledge for the product class, and thus is likely to motivate the consumer to look for ways of mitigating perceived risk by requiring a higher level of trust on the part of the online merchant. Likewise, a consumer requiring a high level of trust on the merchant will choose a digital storefront rather than an e-marketplace, since a digital storefront is believed to be trustworthier than an e-marketplace, as it fulfills orders by itself rather than acting as an intermediary. The findings of the present research provide both academic and practical implications. The first academic implication is that enduring product involvement is a strong motivator of consumer responses, especially the selection of a merchant, in the context of electronic shopping. Secondly, academicians are advised to pay attention to the finding that an individual component or type of perceived risk can be used as an important research construct, since it would allow one to pinpoint the specific types of risk that are influenced by antecedents or that influence consequents. Meanwhile, our research provides implications useful for online merchants (both online storefronts and e-marketplaces). Merchants may develop strategies to attract consumers by managing perceived performance risk involved in purchase decisions, since it was found to have significant positive relationship with the level of trust required by a consumer on the part of the merchant. One way to manage performance risk would be to thoroughly examine the product before shipping to ensure that it has no deficiencies or flaws. Secondly, digital storefronts are advised to focus on symbolic goods (e.g., cars, cell phones, fashion outfits, and handbags) in which consumers are relatively more involved than others, whereas e- marketplaces should put their emphasis on non-symbolic goods (e.g., drinks, books, MP3 players, and bike accessories).

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