Information and communication and home appliance industries, which were one of South Korea's main industries, are gradually losing their export share as their export competitiveness is weakening. This study objectively analyzed export competitiveness and suggested export-promising countries in order to help South Korea's information communication and home appliance industries improve exports. In this study, network properties, centrality, and structural hole analysis were performed during network analysis to evaluate export competitiveness. In order to select promising export countries, we proposed a new variable that can take into account the characteristics of an already established International Trade Network (ITN), that is, the Global Value Chain (GVC), in addition to the existing economic factors. The conditional log-odds for individual links derived from the Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) in the analysis of the cross-border trade network were assumed as a proxy variable that can indicate the export potential. In consideration of the possibility of ERGM linkage, a parametric approach and a non-parametric approach were used to recommend export-promising countries, respectively. In the parametric method, a regression analysis model was developed to predict the export value of the information and communication and home appliance industries in South Korea by additionally considering the link-specific characteristics of the network derived from the ERGM to the existing economic factors. Also, in the non-parametric approach, an abnormality detection algorithm based on the clustering method was used, and a promising export country was proposed as a method of finding outliers that deviate from two peers. According to the research results, the structural characteristic of the export network of the industry was a network with high transferability. Also, according to the centrality analysis result, South Korea's influence on exports was weak compared to its size, and the structural hole analysis result showed that export efficiency was weak. According to the model for recommending promising exporting countries proposed by this study, in parametric analysis, Iran, Ireland, North Macedonia, Angola, and Pakistan were promising exporting countries, and in nonparametric analysis, Qatar, Luxembourg, Ireland, North Macedonia and Pakistan were analyzed as promising exporting countries. There were differences in some countries in the two models. The results of this study revealed that the export competitiveness of South Korea's information and communication and home appliance industries in GVC was not high compared to the size of exports, and thus showed that exports could be further reduced. In addition, this study is meaningful in that it proposed a method to find promising export countries by considering GVC networks with other countries as a way to increase export competitiveness. This study showed that, from a policy point of view, the international trade network of the information communication and home appliance industries has an important mutual relationship, and although transferability is high, it may not be easily expanded to a three-party relationship. In addition, it was confirmed that South Korea's export competitiveness or status was lower than the export size ranking. This paper suggested that in order to improve the low out-degree centrality, it is necessary to increase exports to Italy or Poland, which had significantly higher in-degrees. In addition, we argued that in order to improve the centrality of out-closeness, it is necessary to increase exports to countries with particularly high in-closeness. In particular, it was analyzed that Morocco, UAE, Argentina, Russia, and Canada should pay attention as export countries. This study also provided practical implications for companies expecting to expand exports. The results of this study argue that companies expecting export expansion need to pay attention to countries with a relatively high potential for export expansion compared to the existing export volume by country. In particular, for companies that export daily necessities, countries that should pay attention to the population are presented, and for companies that export high-end or durable products, countries with high GDP, or purchasing power, relatively low exports are presented. Since the process and results of this study can be easily extended and applied to other industries, it is also expected to develop services that utilize the results of this study in the public sector.
This paper analyzes U.S. demand for imports from Asian NIEs and Japan, utilizing the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) developed by Deaton and Muellbauer, with an emphasis on the effect of changes in the exchange rate. The empirical model assumes a two-stage budgeting process in which the first stage represents the allocation of total U.S. demand among three groups: the Asian NIEs and Japan, six Western developed countries, and the U.S. domestic non-tradables and import competing sector. The second stage represents the allocation of total U.S. imports from the Asian NIEs and Japan among them, by country. According to the AIDS model, the share equation for the Asia NIEs and Japan in U.S. nominal GNP is estimated as a single equation for the first stage. The share equations for those five countries in total U.S. imports are estimated as a system with the general demand restrictions of homogeneity, symmetry and adding-up, together with polynomially distributed lag restrictions. The negativity condition is also satisfied for all cases. The overall results of these complicated estimations, using quarterly data from the first quarter of 1972 to the fourth quarter of 1989, are quite promising in terms of the significance of individual estimators and other statistics. The conclusions drawn from the estimation results and the derived demand elasticities can be summarized as follows: First, the exports of each Asian NIE to the U.S. are competitive with (substitutes for) Japan's exports, while complementary to the exports of fellow NIEs, with the exception of the competitive relation between Hong Kong and Singapore. Second, the exports of each Asian NIE and of Japan to the U.S. are competitive with those of Western developed countries' to the U.S, while they are complementary to the U.S.' non-tradables and import-competing sector. Third, as far as both the first and second stages of budgeting are coneidered, the imports from each Asian NIE and Japan are luxuries in total U.S. consumption. However, when only the second budgeting stage is considered, the imports from Japan and Singapore are luxuries in U.S. imports from the NIEs and Japan, while those of Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong are necessities. Fourth, the above results may be evidenced more concretely in their implied exchange rate effects. It appears that, in general, a change in the yen-dollar exchange rate will have at least as great an impact, on an NIE's share and volume of exports to the U.S. though in the opposite direction, as a change in the exchange rate of the NIE's own currency $vis-{\grave{a}}-vis$ the dollar. Asian NIEs, therefore, should counteract yen-dollar movements in order to stabilize their exports to the U.S.. More specifically, Korea should depreciate the value of the won relative to the dollar by approximately the same proportion as the depreciation rate of the yen $vis-{\grave{a}}-vis$ the dollar, in order to maintain the volume of Korean exports to the U.S.. In the worst case scenario, Korea should devalue the won by three times the maguitude of the yen's depreciation rate, in order to keep market share in the aforementioned five countries' total exports to the U.S.. Finally, this study provides additional information which may support empirical findings on the competitive relations among the Asian NIEs and Japan. The correlation matrices among the strutures of those five countries' exports to the U.S.. during the 1970s and 1980s were estimated, with the export structure constructed as the shares of each of the 29 industrial sectors' exports as defined by the 3 digit KSIC in total exports to the U.S. from each individual country. In general, the correlation between each of the four Asian NIEs and Japan, and that between Hong Kong and Singapore, are all far below .5, while the ones among the Asian NIEs themselves (except for the one between Hong Kong and Singapore) all greatly exceed .5. If there exists a tendency on the part of the U.S. to import goods in each specific sector from different countries in a relatively constant proportion, the export structures of those countries will probably exhibit a high correlation. To take this hypothesis to the extreme, if the U.S. maintained an absolutely fixed ratio between its imports from any two countries for each of the 29 sectors, the correlation between the export structures of these two countries would be perfect. Therefore, since any two goods purchased in a fixed proportion could be classified as close complements, a high correlation between export structures will imply a complementary relationship between them. Conversely, low correlation would imply a competitive relationship. According to this interpretation, the pattern formed by the correlation coefficients among the five countries' export structures to the U.S. are consistent with the empirical findings of the regression analysis.
This research starts from the four basic concepts of incentive incompatibility, limited information, myopia and decision variable which are confronted when making decisions in keyword bidding. In order to make these concept concrete, four framework approaches are designed as follows; Strategic approach for the incentive incompatibility, Statistical approach for the limited information, Alternative optimization for myopia, and New model approach for decision variable. The purpose of this research is to propose the statistical optimization model in constructing the portfolio of Sponsored Search Advertising (SSA) in the Sponsor's perspective through empirical tests which can be used in portfolio decision making. Previous research up to date formulates the CTR estimation model using CPC, Rank, Impression, CVR, etc., individually or collectively as the independent variables. However, many of the variables are not controllable in keyword bidding. Only CPC and Rank can be used as decision variables in the bidding system. Classical SSA model is designed on the basic assumption that the CPC is the decision variable and CTR is the response variable. However, this classical model has so many huddles in the estimation of CTR. The main problem is the uncertainty between CPC and Rank. In keyword bid, CPC is continuously fluctuating even at the same Rank. This uncertainty usually raises questions about the credibility of CTR, along with the practical management problems. Sponsors make decisions in keyword bids under the limited information, and the strategic portfolio approach based on statistical models is necessary. In order to solve the problem in Classical SSA model, the New SSA model frame is designed on the basic assumption that Rank is the decision variable. Rank is proposed as the best decision variable in predicting the CTR in many papers. Further, most of the search engine platforms provide the options and algorithms to make it possible to bid with Rank. Sponsors can participate in the keyword bidding with Rank. Therefore, this paper tries to test the validity of this new SSA model and the applicability to construct the optimal portfolio in keyword bidding. Research process is as follows; In order to perform the optimization analysis in constructing the keyword portfolio under the New SSA model, this study proposes the criteria for categorizing the keywords, selects the representing keywords for each category, shows the non-linearity relationship, screens the scenarios for CTR and CPC estimation, selects the best fit model through Goodness-of-Fit (GOF) test, formulates the optimization models, confirms the Spillover effects, and suggests the modified optimization model reflecting Spillover and some strategic recommendations. Tests of Optimization models using these CTR/CPC estimation models are empirically performed with the objective functions of (1) maximizing CTR (CTR optimization model) and of (2) maximizing expected profit reflecting CVR (namely, CVR optimization model). Both of the CTR and CVR optimization test result show that the suggested SSA model confirms the significant improvements and this model is valid in constructing the keyword portfolio using the CTR/CPC estimation models suggested in this study. However, one critical problem is found in the CVR optimization model. Important keywords are excluded from the keyword portfolio due to the myopia of the immediate low profit at present. In order to solve this problem, Markov Chain analysis is carried out and the concept of Core Transit Keyword (CTK) and Expected Opportunity Profit (EOP) are introduced. The Revised CVR Optimization model is proposed and is tested and shows validity in constructing the portfolio. Strategic guidelines and insights are as follows; Brand keywords are usually dominant in almost every aspects of CTR, CVR, the expected profit, etc. Now, it is found that the Generic keywords are the CTK and have the spillover potentials which might increase consumers awareness and lead them to Brand keyword. That's why the Generic keyword should be focused in the keyword bidding. The contribution of the thesis is to propose the novel SSA model based on Rank as decision variable, to propose to manage the keyword portfolio by categories according to the characteristics of keywords, to propose the statistical modelling and managing based on the Rank in constructing the keyword portfolio, and to perform empirical tests and propose a new strategic guidelines to focus on the CTK and to propose the modified CVR optimization objective function reflecting the spillover effect in stead of the previous expected profit models.
Growing interest of stakeholders on corporate responsibilities for environment and tightening environmental regulations are highlighting the importance of environmental management more than ever. However, companies' awareness of the importance of environment is still falling behind, and related academic works have not shown consistent conclusions on the relationship between environmental performance and economic performance. One of the reasons is different ways of measuring these two performances. The evaluation scope of economic performance is relatively narrow and the performance can be measured by a unified unit such as price, while the scope of environmental performance is diverse and a wide range of units are used for measuring environmental performances instead of using a single unified unit. Therefore, the results of works can be different depending on the performance indicators selected. In order to resolve this problem, generalized and standardized performance indicators should be developed. In particular, the performance indicators should be able to cover the concepts of both environmental and economic performances because the recent idea of environmental management has expanded to encompass the concept of sustainability. Another reason is that most of the current researches tend to focus on the motive of environmental investments and environmental performance, and do not offer a guideline for an effective implementation strategy for environmental management. For example, a process improvement strategy or a market discrimination strategy can be deployed through comparing the environment competitiveness among the companies in the same or similar industries, so that a virtuous cyclical relationship between environmental and economic performances can be secured. A novel method for measuring eco-efficiency by utilizing Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which is able to combine multiple environmental and economic performances, is proposed in this report. Based on the eco-efficiencies, the environmental competitiveness is analyzed and the optimal combination of inputs and outputs are recommended for improving the eco-efficiencies of inefficient firms. Furthermore, the panel analysis is applied to the causal relationship between eco-efficiency and economic performance, and the pooled regression model is used to investigate the relationship between eco-efficiency and economic performance. The four-year eco-efficiencies between 2010 and 2013 of 23 companies are obtained from the DEA analysis; a comparison of efficiencies among 23 companies is carried out in terms of technical efficiency(TE), pure technical efficiency(PTE) and scale efficiency(SE), and then a set of recommendations for optimal combination of inputs and outputs are suggested for the inefficient companies. Furthermore, the experimental results with the panel analysis have demonstrated the causality from eco-efficiency to economic performance. The results of the pooled regression have shown that eco-efficiency positively affect financial perform ances(ROA and ROS) of the companies, as well as firm values(Tobin Q, stock price, and stock returns). This report proposes a novel approach for generating standardized performance indicators obtained from multiple environmental and economic performances, so that it is able to enhance the generality of relevant researches and provide a deep insight into the sustainability of environmental management. Furthermore, using efficiency indicators obtained from the DEA model, the cause of change in eco-efficiency can be investigated and an effective strategy for environmental management can be suggested. Finally, this report can be a motive for environmental management by providing empirical evidence that environmental investments can improve economic performance.
The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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v.3
no.1
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pp.28-30
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1978
Communication actions as a social band or Human community stick (fast) to human being ceaselessly w without stopping everywhere. All of comm. actions can be kept up and developed by the education of its own. Comm. actions have to include a character of social process, and so for it the social science should t to be some essential part of it. Therefore, Comm. education have to be schemed for achieving with a point of view of synthetical s science including technical and social factor. However, recentry Comm. education be suffered to lose of itowns essential attribute and individual i independence becausing to reduce social weight recklessly in their education It is a prindiple that Comm. science is an integrate science being composed of human, social and t technical subdepartments and so comm. education have to obey for Comm. constuctional theory, i international and social claim. Originally in Korea a educational idea and genealogy forming by the comm. scientific theory has I inherited on orthodoxy. But in 1961, communication college that is only the orthodox model of Comm. education, was f forced to close by some reckless policy and then the national administration for the Comm. education h have been weakened, and so recently it’s education became to degenerate as out of genealogy or n nonsystem alike some scattering Family. On the other side, today comm. science make to it’s modern scientific factor and to keep its l integrate level, therefore, all of educational provisions and administration for the telecomm. should t to be supplement to be fit for their plural chatacters. Comm. education have to occupy an individual educational system through the comm. theory, and t then it can be coexisted with neighbour scientific field equally and can include, connect coordinate o or effect its inference in each subfactor organically. Finally, educational system for telecommunication should to be requested as preeedence that i independent field including pluralism must be formed and sufficient autonomy be guarenteed, and s so Comm. education must be to restored its orthodox genealogy and be recovered individual system a and seIfrestraint field, and then it can be accomplished its own duty for nation and society.
Recently, as the demand for big data analysis increases, cases of analyzing unstructured data and using the results are also increasing. Among the various types of unstructured data, text is used as a means of communicating information in almost all fields. In addition, many analysts are interested in the amount of data is very large and relatively easy to collect compared to other unstructured and structured data. Among the various text analysis applications, document classification which classifies documents into predetermined categories, topic modeling which extracts major topics from a large number of documents, sentimental analysis or opinion mining that identifies emotions or opinions contained in texts, and Text Summarization which summarize the main contents from one document or several documents have been actively studied. Especially, the text summarization technique is actively applied in the business through the news summary service, the privacy policy summary service, ect. In addition, much research has been done in academia in accordance with the extraction approach which provides the main elements of the document selectively and the abstraction approach which extracts the elements of the document and composes new sentences by combining them. However, the technique of evaluating the quality of automatically summarized documents has not made much progress compared to the technique of automatic text summarization. Most of existing studies dealing with the quality evaluation of summarization were carried out manual summarization of document, using them as reference documents, and measuring the similarity between the automatic summary and reference document. Specifically, automatic summarization is performed through various techniques from full text, and comparison with reference document, which is an ideal summary document, is performed for measuring the quality of automatic summarization. Reference documents are provided in two major ways, the most common way is manual summarization, in which a person creates an ideal summary by hand. Since this method requires human intervention in the process of preparing the summary, it takes a lot of time and cost to write the summary, and there is a limitation that the evaluation result may be different depending on the subject of the summarizer. Therefore, in order to overcome these limitations, attempts have been made to measure the quality of summary documents without human intervention. On the other hand, as a representative attempt to overcome these limitations, a method has been recently devised to reduce the size of the full text and to measure the similarity of the reduced full text and the automatic summary. In this method, the more frequent term in the full text appears in the summary, the better the quality of the summary. However, since summarization essentially means minimizing a lot of content while minimizing content omissions, it is unreasonable to say that a "good summary" based on only frequency always means a "good summary" in its essential meaning. In order to overcome the limitations of this previous study of summarization evaluation, this study proposes an automatic quality evaluation for text summarization method based on the essential meaning of summarization. Specifically, the concept of succinctness is defined as an element indicating how few duplicated contents among the sentences of the summary, and completeness is defined as an element that indicating how few of the contents are not included in the summary. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic quality evaluation of text summarization based on the concepts of succinctness and completeness. In order to evaluate the practical applicability of the proposed methodology, 29,671 sentences were extracted from TripAdvisor 's hotel reviews, summarized the reviews by each hotel and presented the results of the experiments conducted on evaluation of the quality of summaries in accordance to the proposed methodology. It also provides a way to integrate the completeness and succinctness in the trade-off relationship into the F-Score, and propose a method to perform the optimal summarization by changing the threshold of the sentence similarity.
In this article, we examined the patterns of activities of the Sarmathians though in a humble measure, with a focus on the regions where the Sarmathian sheaths spreaded. One of the main weapons the mounted nomads like the Scythias, the Sarmathians, and the Alans used at war was a spear. Though complementary, a sword was the most convenient and appropriate weapon when fighting at a near distance, fallen from the horse to the ground. The Sarmathian swords continued the tradition of the Akinakes which the Scythias or the Persians used, but those of the Sarmathians showed some advances in terms of the easiness with which a sword was drawn out from a sheath, and the way the sheaths were worn to parts of a human body. It turns out that the Sarmathian sheaths, which were designed for the people to draw swords easily, having the sheaths attached to thighs through 4 bumps, spread extensively from Pazyryk, Altai, to South Siberia, Bactria, Parthia and Rome. The most noteworthy out of all the Sarmathian sheaths were the ones that were excavated from the 4th tomb in Tillatepe, Afghanistan which belonged to the region of Bactria. The owner of the fourth tomb of Tilla-tepe whose region was under the control of Kushan Dynasty at that time, was buried wearing Sarmathian swords, and regarded as a big shot in the region of Bactria which was also under the governance of Kushan Dynasty. The fact that the owner of the tomb wore two swords suggests that there had been active exchange between Bactria and Sarmathia. It seemed that the reason why the Sarmathians could play an important role in the exchange between the East and the West might have something to do with their role of supplying Chinese goods to Silk Road. That's why we are interested in how the copper mirrors of Han Dynasty, decoration beads like melon-type beads, crystal beads and goldring articulated beads, and the artifacts of South China which produced silks were excavated in the northern steppe route where the Sarmathians actively worked. Our study have established that the eye beads discovered in Sarmathian tomb estimated to have been built around the 1st century B.C. were reprocessed in China, and then imported to Sarmathia again. We should note the Huns as a medium between the Sarmathians and the South China which were far apart from each other. Thus gold-ring articulated beads which were spread out mainly across the South China has been discovered in the Huns' remains. On the other hand, between 2nd century B.C. and 2nd century A.D. which were main periods of the Sarmathians, it was considered that the traffic route connecting the steppe route and the South China might be West-South silk road which started from Yunnan, passed through Myanmar, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and then went into the east of India. The West-south Silk road is presumed to have been used by nomadic tribes who wanted to get the goods from South China before the Oasis route was activated by the Han Dynasty's policy of managing the countries bordering on Western China.
Choi, Hyunseung;Kim, Mintae;Kim, Wooju;Shin, Dongwook;Lee, Yong Hun
Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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v.24
no.4
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pp.111-136
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2018
In this paper, we propose a methodology to extract answer information about queries from various types of unstructured documents collected from multi-sources existing on web in order to expand knowledge base. The proposed methodology is divided into the following steps. 1) Collect relevant documents from Wikipedia, Naver encyclopedia, and Naver news sources for "subject-predicate" separated queries and classify the proper documents. 2) Determine whether the sentence is suitable for extracting information and derive the confidence. 3) Based on the predicate feature, extract the information in the proper sentence and derive the overall confidence of the information extraction result. In order to evaluate the performance of the information extraction system, we selected 400 queries from the artificial intelligence speaker of SK-Telecom. Compared with the baseline model, it is confirmed that it shows higher performance index than the existing model. The contribution of this study is that we develop a sequence tagging model based on bi-directional LSTM-CRF using the predicate feature of the query, with this we developed a robust model that can maintain high recall performance even in various types of unstructured documents collected from multiple sources. The problem of information extraction for knowledge base extension should take into account heterogeneous characteristics of source-specific document types. The proposed methodology proved to extract information effectively from various types of unstructured documents compared to the baseline model. There is a limitation in previous research that the performance is poor when extracting information about the document type that is different from the training data. In addition, this study can prevent unnecessary information extraction attempts from the documents that do not include the answer information through the process for predicting the suitability of information extraction of documents and sentences before the information extraction step. It is meaningful that we provided a method that precision performance can be maintained even in actual web environment. The information extraction problem for the knowledge base expansion has the characteristic that it can not guarantee whether the document includes the correct answer because it is aimed at the unstructured document existing in the real web. When the question answering is performed on a real web, previous machine reading comprehension studies has a limitation that it shows a low level of precision because it frequently attempts to extract an answer even in a document in which there is no correct answer. The policy that predicts the suitability of document and sentence information extraction is meaningful in that it contributes to maintaining the performance of information extraction even in real web environment. The limitations of this study and future research directions are as follows. First, it is a problem related to data preprocessing. In this study, the unit of knowledge extraction is classified through the morphological analysis based on the open source Konlpy python package, and the information extraction result can be improperly performed because morphological analysis is not performed properly. To enhance the performance of information extraction results, it is necessary to develop an advanced morpheme analyzer. Second, it is a problem of entity ambiguity. The information extraction system of this study can not distinguish the same name that has different intention. If several people with the same name appear in the news, the system may not extract information about the intended query. In future research, it is necessary to take measures to identify the person with the same name. Third, it is a problem of evaluation query data. In this study, we selected 400 of user queries collected from SK Telecom 's interactive artificial intelligent speaker to evaluate the performance of the information extraction system. n this study, we developed evaluation data set using 800 documents (400 questions * 7 articles per question (1 Wikipedia, 3 Naver encyclopedia, 3 Naver news) by judging whether a correct answer is included or not. To ensure the external validity of the study, it is desirable to use more queries to determine the performance of the system. This is a costly activity that must be done manually. Future research needs to evaluate the system for more queries. It is also necessary to develop a Korean benchmark data set of information extraction system for queries from multi-source web documents to build an environment that can evaluate the results more objectively.
Internet commerce has been growing at a rapid pace for the last decade. Many firms try to reach wider consumer markets by adding the Internet channel to the existing traditional channels. Despite the various benefits of the Internet channel, a significant number of firms failed in managing the new type of channel. Previous studies could not cleary explain these conflicting results associated with the Internet channel. One of the major reasons is most of the previous studies conducted analyses under a specific market condition and claimed that as the impact of Internet channel introduction. Therefore, their results are strongly influenced by the specific market settings. However, firms face various market conditions in the real worlddensity and disutility of using the Internet. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of various market environments on a firm's optimal channel strategy by employing a flexible game theory model. We capture various market conditions with consumer density and disutility of using the Internet.
shows the channel structures analyzed in this study. Before the Internet channel is introduced, a monopoly manufacturer sells its products through an independent physical store. From this structure, the manufacturer could introduce its own Internet channel (MI). The independent physical store could also introduce its own Internet channel and coordinate it with the existing physical store (RI). An independent Internet retailer such as Amazon could enter this market (II). In this case, two types of independent retailers compete with each other. In this model, consumers are uniformly distributed on the two dimensional space. Consumer heterogeneity is captured by a consumer's geographical location (ci) and his disutility of using the Internet channel (${\delta}_{N_i}$).
shows various market conditions captured by the two consumer heterogeneities.
(a) illustrates a market with symmetric consumer distributions. The model captures explicitly the asymmetric distributions of consumer disutility in a market as well. In a market like that is represented in
(c), the average consumer disutility of using an Internet store is relatively smaller than that of using a physical store. For example, this case represents the market in which 1) the product is suitable for Internet transactions (e.g., books) or 2) the level of E-Commerce readiness is high such as in Denmark or Finland. On the other hand, the average consumer disutility when using an Internet store is relatively greater than that of using a physical store in a market like (b). Countries like Ukraine and Bulgaria, or the market for "experience goods" such as shoes, could be examples of this market condition.
summarizes the various scenarios of consumer distributions analyzed in this study. The range for disutility of using the Internet (${\delta}_{N_i}$) is held constant, while the range of consumer distribution (${\chi}_i$) varies from -25 to 25, from -50 to 50, from -100 to 100, from -150 to 150, and from -200 to 200.
summarizes the analysis results. As the average travel cost in a market decreases while the average disutility of Internet use remains the same, average retail price, total quantity sold, physical store profit, monopoly manufacturer profit, and thus, total channel profit increase. On the other hand, the quantity sold through the Internet and the profit of the Internet store decrease with a decreasing average travel cost relative to the average disutility of Internet use. We find that a channel that has an advantage over the other kind of channel serves a larger portion of the market. In a market with a high average travel cost, in which the Internet store has a relative advantage over the physical store, for example, the Internet store becomes a mass-retailer serving a larger portion of the market. This result implies that the Internet becomes a more significant distribution channel in those markets characterized by greater geographical dispersion of buyers, or as consumers become more proficient in Internet usage. The results indicate that the degree of price discrimination also varies depending on the distribution of consumer disutility in a market. The manufacturer in a market in which the average travel cost is higher than the average disutility of using the Internet has a stronger incentive for price discrimination than the manufacturer in a market where the average travel cost is relatively lower. We also find that the manufacturer has a stronger incentive to maintain a high price level when the average travel cost in a market is relatively low. Additionally, the retail competition effect due to Internet channel introduction strengthens as average travel cost in a market decreases. This result indicates that a manufacturer's channel power relative to that of the independent physical retailer becomes stronger with a decreasing average travel cost. This implication is counter-intuitive, because it is widely believed that the negative impact of Internet channel introduction on a competing physical retailer is more significant in a market like Russia, where consumers are more geographically dispersed, than in a market like Hong Kong, that has a condensed geographic distribution of consumers.