• Journal of Animal Science and Technology
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• v.51 no.1
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• pp.81-90
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• 2009

This study was carried out to investigate consumer's preference and purchase behavior of pork including perception of brand-pork in Korea. A total of 504 respondents were surveyed and collected from December, 2007 to February, 2008. Among total respondents, 62.55% (n=314) responded that they liked the pork and respondents who were higher education level showed higher preference (p<0.05). Majority of consumers (61.16%) did not like imported pork. In addition, one who had lower education level and living in rural area disliked more the imported pork. Most consumers preferred to the belly (58.57%) and results indicated that the people who were higher education level preferred a discount mart but who were living in rural area preferred a butcher's shop. Among the purchasing area, a big discount mart was the most preferred (44.64%) and this was also different among the education level (p<0.001) and living areas (p<0.05). The consumers preferred to purchasing a 600 g pack for a single purchase. Among total respondents, 42.71% of consumers responded that their priority was reliability of meat quality on choosing the place for purchasing the pork, and the significant difference was highly found in living area groups (p<0.001). The perception of carcass grading system was common scores with the average of 2.79, and there was highly significant difference among education level groups (p<0.001). The average of 3.50 among 5 points for branded pork were evaluated by a total of consumers but the significant differences were not found in all three groups.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.97-125
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• 2012

Companies recently introduce art collaborated products incorporating culture into a product. Art collaborated products include incorporating famous movies and/or design of an artist into a newly launched product. The introduction of art collaborated products are gradually increasing. However, research for this trend is relatively scarce. Although research concerning design has discussed a number of different factors as playing a role in influencing responses to design including culture, fashion, innate preferences, etc.), only limited attention has been paid to the processes by which consumers generate responses to product designs. People with different characteristics may respond differently. When people encounter these art products, they may become curious, may think that these products are unique, novel and innovative. People tend to show different levels of curiosity when they encounter new and novel objects, which they have rarely seen or experienced. Curiosity is defined as a desire for acquiring new knowledge and new sensory experience. Previous studies demonstrated that curiosity motivates individuals to engage in exploratory behaviors. People also show different levels of need for uniqueness, which is defined as being different from others or becoming distinctive among a larger group. Individual's need for uniqueness results from signals conveyed by the material objects that individuals choose to display. Recently, researcher have developed the need for uniqueness with three distinct constructs. These three concepts include creative choice, unpopular choice, and avoidance of similarity. Creative choice is a trait tendency of an individual by expressing or differentiating himself from others through consumptions of unique products. Unpopular choice is related to an individual's tendency to consume products, which deviates from group norms. Avoidance of similarity is linked to the avoidance of consumption behavior of products that are not famous. Past research implies that people with different levels of need for uniqueness show different motivational processes. Previous research also demonstrates that different customer emotions may be derived when consumers are exposed to these art collaborated products. Research tradition has been investigated three different emotional responses such as pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Pleasure is defined as the degree to which a person feels good, joyful, happy, or satisfied in a situation. Arousal is defined as the extent to which a person feels stimulated, active, or excited. Dominance is defined as the extent that a person feels powerful vis-a-vis the environment that surrounds him/her. Previous research show that complex, speedy, and surprising stimuli may excite consumers and thus make them more pleased and engaged in their approach behavior. However, the current study identified these emotional responses as positive emotion, negative emotion, and arousal. These derived emotions may lead consumers to approach and/or avoidance behaviors. In addition, males and females tend to respond differently when they are exposed to art collaboration products. Building on this research tradition, the current study aims to investigate the inter-relationships between individual traits such as curiosity and need for uniqueness and individual's emotional responses including positive and negative emotion and arousal when people encounter various art collaborated products. Emotional responses are proposed to influence purchase intention. Additionally, previous studies show that male and females respond differently to similar stimuli. Accordingly, gender difference are proposed to moderate the links between individual traits and emotional responses. These research aims of the current study may contribute to extending our knowledge in terms of (1) which individual characteristics are related to different emotions, and (2) how these different emotional responses inter-connected to future purchase intention of arts collaborated products. In addition, (3) the different responses to these arts collaborated products by males and females will guide managers how to concoct different strategies to these segments. The questionnaire for the present study was adopted from the previous literature and validated with a pilot test. The survey was conducted in Daegu, a third largest city in South Korea, for three weeks during June and July 2011. Most respondents were in their twenties and thirties. 350 questionnaires were distributed and among them 300 were proved to be valid (valid response rate of 85.7%). Survey questionnaires from valid 300 respondents are used to test hypotheses proposed. The structural equation model (SEM) was used to validate the research model. The measurement and structural model was tested using LISREL 8.7. The measurement model test demonstrated that consistency, convergent validity, and discriminat validity of the measurement items were acceptable. The results from the structural model demonstrate that curiosity has a positive impact on positive emotion, but not on negative emotion and arousal. Need for uniqueness has three different sub-concepts such as creative choice, unpopular choice, and avoidance of similarity. The results show that creative choice has a positive effect on arousal and positive emotion, but has a negative impact on negative emotion. Unpopular choice has a positive effect on arousal, but on neither positive nor negative emotions. Avoidance of similarity has no impact on neither emotions nor arousal. The results also demonstrated that gender has a moderating influence. Males show more negative emotion to creative and unpopular choices. Implications and future research directions are discussed in conclusion.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.71-99
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• 2010

Most of studies on patriotism in the marketing area have focused on ethnocentric tendencies observed in consumption behaviors. On the contrary, there have been few empirical studies on how patriotism in the general sense, indicating affection for, attachment to, and pride in the country, influences consumers' evaluation of domestic and foreign products. Given the current situation that marketing activities appealing to people's patriotism is increasing, this is somewhat surprising. Thus, this study examined empirically how patriotism influences people's evaluation of domestic and foreign products. In addition, we tested whether consumer ethnocentrism works as an intervening variable in the relation between patriotism and product evaluation. The empirical analysis was conducted through a questionnaire survey of undergraduate and graduate students at universities in Seoul. The survey asked about the respondents' patriotism, consumer ethnocentrism, domestic product evaluation, foreign product evaluation, and demographical characteristics. In foreign product evaluation, the respondents were requested to evaluate Chinese and Japanese products. Email was used to send and recover the questionnaires, and 135 replies were used in the analysis. Major findings from the empirical analysis are as follows. First, a significant relationship was observed between patriotism and domestic product evaluation. That is, patriotic participants evaluated domestic products more favorably. On the other hand, no significant relationship was observed between patriotism and foreign product evaluation(See Table 1-1 and 1-2). Next, the effect of patriotism on domestic product evaluation was mediated by consumer ethnocentrism. However, whether the effect of patriotism on domestic product evaluation is mediated by consumer ethnocentrism partially or fully was different according to product(See Table 2-1 and 2-2). Lastly, we tried to analyze the relation between consumer ethnocentrism and product evaluation and comparing the results with findings of previous researches. According to the results, a significant relationship was observed between consumer ethnocentrism and domestic product evaluation but not between consumer ethnocentrism and foreign product evaluation. The meanings of this study are as follows. First, there have been few marketing studies that investigated the relation between patriotism and product evaluation. Thus, this study is meaningful in that it supplemented the limitation of previous research. Second, consumer ethnocentrism was found to mediate the relation between patriotism and domestic product evaluation. Considering the absence of previous research that examined the role of consumer ethnocentrism as an intervening variable, this study is significant in that it expanded the scope of research on consumer ethnocentrism. Third, from the practical aspect, the results of this study suggest that marketing appealing to patriotism is effective in stimulating consumers' purchase and consumption of domestic products. Accordingly, such a marketing strategy is expected to be effective in protecting domestic markets from imported goods and overseas brands and to increase demands for domestic products and brands. However, there is the question of whether the effect of patriotism based marketing strategies in promoting demand for domestic products would persist. That is, this study could not find a significant relation between patriotism and foreign product evaluation, and this means that the increase in patriotism for the home country does not damage people's view to the quality of foreign products negatively. Accordingly, without change in people's perception of foreign products, it is highly likely that the increase in demand for domestic products or brands induced by patriotism elevated at a specific time or situation may not last long. Fourth, the results of this study suggest that the patriotism level may influence consumers' choice behavior toward retailers strongly connected to a specific country or region. That is, consumers with high level patriotism may hesitate or avoid using a retailer associated with some foreign country. Fifth, according to the results of this study, when people's patriotism is stimulated by a specific social situation or event, it can be an opportunity for domestic franchise brands to increase their market performance such as sales and market share and, at the same time, for foreign franchise brands to experience adversities. Therefore, during a period like the Olympic Games or the World Cup when people's sense of belonging or attachment to their country is heightened, domestic franchise brands need to make marketing activities that may lead market opportunities to substantial results and foreign franchise brands to cope with such adversities. Sixth, consumers' brand choice is often made in retail stores. It has been demonstrated by numerous studies that in store stimuli such as point of purchase display can affect consumers' behavior. Considering this, domestic brands facing competition with foreign brands should make continuous efforts to enhance the market performance of their products through developing in store stimuli that can stimulate consumers' patriotism. Finally, based on the major findings of this study, both academic and practical issues were discussed. Suggestions for future studies were provided.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.493-513
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• 2014

With the development of related technologies, Location-Based Services (LBS) are growing fast and being used in many ways. Past LBS studies have focused on adoption of LBS because of the fact that LBS users have privacy concerns regarding revealing their location information. Meanwhile, the number of LBS users and revenues from LBS are growing rapidly because users can get some benefits by revealing their location information. Little research has been done on how LBS affects consumers' information search behavior in product purchase. The purpose of this paper is examining the effect of LBS information filtering on buyers' uncertainty and their information search behavior. When consumers purchase a product, they try to reduce uncertainty by searching information. Generally, there are two types of uncertainties - knowledge uncertainty and choice uncertainty. Knowledge uncertainty refers to the lack of information on what kinds of alternatives are available in the market and/or their important attributes. Therefore, consumers having knowledge uncertainty will have difficulties in identifying what alternatives exist in the market to fulfil their needs. Choice uncertainty refers to the lack of information about consumers' own preferences and which alternative will fit in their needs. Therefore, consumers with choice uncertainty have difficulties selecting best product among available alternatives.. According to economics of information theory, consumers narrow the scope of information search when knowledge uncertainty is high. It is because consumers' information search cost is high when their knowledge uncertainty is high. If people do not know available alternatives and their attributes, it takes time and cognitive efforts for them to acquire information about available alternatives. Therefore, they will reduce search breadth. For people with high knowledge uncertainty, the information about products and their attributes is new and of high value for them. Therefore, they will conduct searches more in-depth because they have incentive to acquire more information. When people have high choice uncertainty, people tend to search information about more alternatives. It is because increased search breadth will improve their chances to find better alternative for them. On the other hand, since human's cognitive capacity is limited, the increased search breadth (more alternatives) will reduce the depth of information search for each alternative. Consumers with high choice uncertainty will spend less time and effort for each alternative because considering more alternatives will increase their utility. LBS provides users with the capability to screen alternatives based on the distance from them, which reduces information search costs. Therefore, it is expected that LBS will help users consider more alternatives even when they have high knowledge uncertainty. LBS provides distance information, which helps users choose alternatives appropriate for them. Therefore, users will perceive lower choice uncertainty when they use LBS. In order to test the hypotheses, we selected 80 students and assigned them to one of the two experiment groups. One group was asked to use LBS to search surrounding restaurants and the other group was asked to not use LBS to search nearby restaurants. The experimental tasks and measures items were validated in a pilot experiment. The final measurement items are shown in Appendix A. Each subject was asked to read one of the two scenarios - with or without LBS - and use a smartphone application to pick a restaurant. All behaviors on smartphone were recorded using a recording application. Search breadth was measured by the number of restaurants clicked by each subject. Search depths was measured by two metrics - the average number of sub-level pages each subject visited and the average time spent on each restaurant. The hypotheses were tested using SPSS and PLS. The results show that knowledge uncertainty reduces search breadth (H1a). However, there was no significant correlation between knowledge uncertainty and search depth (H1b). Choice uncertainty significantly reduces search depth (H2b), but no significant relationship was found between choice uncertainty and search breadth (H2a). LBS information filtering significantly reduces the buyers' choice uncertainty (H4) and reduces the negative relationship between knowledge uncertainty and search breadth (H3). This research provides some important implications for service providers. Service providers should use different strategies based on their service properties. For those service providers who are not well-known to consumers (high knowledge uncertainty) should encourage their customers to use LBS. This is because LBS would increase buyers' consideration sets when the knowledge uncertainty is high. Therefore, less known services have chances to be included in consumers' consideration sets with LBS. On the other hand, LBS information filtering decrease choice uncertainty and the near service providers are more likely to be selected than without LBS. Hence, service providers should analyze geographically approximate competitors' strength and try to reduce the gap so that they can have chances to be included in the consideration set.

• Journal of the Korean GEO-environmental Society
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.53-62
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• 2014

In Korea, in general, separation distance between existing parallel tunnels was set at two to five times as distant as the diameter of the tunnels according to ground conditions. Recently, however, actual applicability of closely spaced parallel tunnels whose distance between tunnel centers was shorter than the diameter has increased due to environmental damages resulting from massive cutting, restriction in purchase of required land, and maintenance of linear continuity. In particular, when the pillar width of tunnel decreases, the safety of pillars affects behaviors of the tunnel and therefore the need for diverse relevant studies has emerged. However, research so far has been largely confined to analysis of behavior characteristics of pillars, or parameters affecting design, and actually applicable and quantitative data have not been presented. Accordingly, in order to present a stability evaluation method which may maximally reflect construction conditions of spots, this study reflected topographical and stratigraphic characteristics of the portal part with the highest closeness between the tunnels, simulated multi-layer conditions with rock mass and complete weathering, and assessed the degree of effect the stability of pillars had on the entire tunnels through numerical analysis according to changes in pillar width by ground strength. This study also presented composite analysis result on ground surface settlement rates, interference volume rates, and average strength to stress and a formula, which may be applicable to actual work, to evaluate safety rates of closely spaced parallel tunnel pillars and minimum pillar width by ground strength based on failure criteria by Hoek-Brown (1980).

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.259-271
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• 2012

As the society's expectations of business have drastically amplified in recent years, an increasing number of companies have devoted their resources and managerial attention to corporate social responsibility. However, little information bas been reported on consumers' expectations on social responsibility of restaurant companies. This research studied the consumer's perception on the socially responsible business practices of restaurant companies. The research also investigated if the customer's expectations differ based on the types of restaurants. Overall, it was found that the consumers strongly feel the necessities of restaurants' socially responsible activities and publicity of those activities (4.08 and 4.05, respectively, out of 5). They also responded that the socially responsible behaviors of restaurants somewhat affect their purchase decisions (3.74 out of 5). As a result of a principle component analysis, five types of socially responsible activities(i.e., philanthropic responsibility, economic responsibility, community responsibility, environmental protection responsibility, and consumer protection responsibility) were extracted. In addition, the results showed that the consumer's expectations toward socially responsible activities of restaurants differ based on the types of restaurants (multivariate F=4.616, p=0.000).

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.31 no.12
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• pp.1772-1783
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• 2007

This study aimed to investigate differences in the purchasing patterns of and the levels of satisfaction with cosmetic products, and the method of disposing dissatisfied cosmetics for female university students among China, Japan and Korea. Survey was conducted with 1,200 female coeducational university students in Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul and 1,115 were used for the data analysis. Data were analysed by frequency analysis, Cronbach's ${\alpha}$, chi-square analysis, analysis of variance, Duncan's Multiple Range test. The results showed significant differences in purchasing behaviors in China, Japan and Korea. Japanese students mainly got information through objective sources, while Koreans did so through human network. Regrading the evaluative criteria for basic care items, function and effect were the most important criteria for Chinese and Korean consumers and skin compatibility for Japanese. For color make-up, Chinese, Japanese and Korean respondents respectively cared the most on brand image, convenience of purchase and the current trend. Chinese tended to shop cosmetics at department stores due to store reputation, Japanese preferred supermarkets and pharmacies and Koreans shopped at discount stores for low price. The most influential human sources were friends and colleagues for Chinese and Korean, and models on advertisements and magazines for Japanese. Korean respondents displayed the highest level of satisfaction with cosmetics followed by Japanese and Chinese. As for the methods of disposing dissatisfactory cosmetics, Chinese were the most active in exchanging for other product; Japanese and Korean were not likely to use or throw the products away.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.45-65
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• 2009

As a number of people using the internet for their shopping steadily rises, it is increasingly important for retailers to understand why consumers decide to buy products via online or offline. The main purpose of this study is to develop and test a model that enhance our understanding of how consumers respond future online and offline channels for their purchasing. Rather than merely adopting statistical models like most other studies in this field, the present study develops a model that combines double-cohort method with multinomial logit model. It is desirable if one can adopt an overall encompassing criterion in the study of consumer behaviors form diverse sales channels. This study uses the concept of cohort or aging to enable this comparison. It enables us to analyze how consumers respond to online and offline channels as people aged by measuring their shopping behavior for an online and offline retailers and their subsequent purchase intentions. Based on some empirical findings, this study concludes with policy implications and some necessary fields of future studies desirable.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.69-94
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• 2010

With the liberalization of distribution services industry since 1996 as well as changes in customers' appetite to spend and consumer behaviors, new forms of distribution services have mushroomed such as superstores and SSM(Super Supermarket), online shopping, TV shopping channels. On the contrary, traditional markets have sunk into a swamp of stagnation. As this stage of stagnation of markets negatively affects tradespeople's employment, livings, and local economy, the Korean government has conducted policies to support improvement of market facilities and management since 2004. However, the government has separated facility improvement from management improvement. As of June 2008, there are 1,550 traditional markets in Korea and among these there are 388 public markets which local governments have established and managed. Public markets have possibilities to be developed as successful models of market revitalization since they can get all-expenses-paid supports for facility improvement, control of merchandise assortment, educational program for merchants. Such successful (strategic hub) markets could become the benchmark for other neighboring markets and tradespeople which could lead other successful cases. In order to produce such effects, the market should have optimized facilities, merchandise and services, co-marketing strategies with nearby markets, group purchase strategies. The hub market could play a critical role in distribution of local goods and developing high value products.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.137-158
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• 2008

Rapid development of various information technologies creates new opportunities in online and offline markets. In this changing market environment, customers have various demands on new products and services. Therefore, their power and influence on the markets grow stronger each year. Companies have paid great attention to customer relationship management. Especially, personalized product recommendation systems, which recommend products and services based on customer's private information or purchasing behaviors in stores, is an important asset to most companies. CRM is one of the important business processes where reliable information is mined from customer database. Data mining techniques such as artificial intelligence are popular tools used to extract useful information and knowledge from these customer databases. In this research, we propose a recommendation system that predicts customer's purchase intention. Then, customer's purchasing intention of specific product is predicted by using data mining techniques using receipt data set. The performance of this suggested method is compared with that of other data mining technologies.