• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.34 no.7
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• pp.1087-1099
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• 2010

This study explores the retail environment factors of the changes mentioned in the "Factors and Directions of the Change of the Apparel Retail Structure in Korea" (Part I) to understand the changes in apparel retail institutions. This study was done through a literature research method and the results are as follows. First, changing consumer needs and trends require extensive new products, a method to manufacture diverse products according to the market demand, and the necessity to manufacture based on trends in demand. This limits the role of mass production, which brought about more flexible manufacturing modes, scaled down manufacturing factories, promoted more cooperative subcontract relationships, and increased global sourcing which uses other companies at the most appropriate global venue. How to organize and use cooperative networks that benefit companies is the key to global competitiveness in the new era and the information technology developed around retail shops plays a key role. Consequently, the management of consumers and their information becomes critical and retail distribution functions become a key corporate function. In addition, it is difficult for small shops to introduce effective new technologies that encourage the growth of large companies. Second, apparel companies that use to benefit from scale merits based on the previous mass production system are now becoming effective by using economies of scale through mass retailing while shops are enlarging their sizes as a way to survive. On the other hand, inexpensive clothes become even more inexpensive while expensive ones become even more expensive, promoting polarization and diverse price ranges that widen consumer options.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.523-528
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• 2008

Franchising is a business sector which can be enlarged to a large scale in retailing business. Franchising has expanded its realm of business into realestate business and education business, starting from hospitality business. In franchising, the management of customers is a critical issue, so many franchising companies actively implement the CRM system to improve customer relationship. Therefore, this research focuses on the intention of franchising companies about the implementation of the CRM system. The information system used for managing franchising business is defined as Franchising Information Systems(FIS). In this research, the impact of technological level, educational level and utilization strategy of FIS on the ability of FIS use were analyzed. In addition, the impact of the ability of FIS use on the intention of franchising companies about the implementation of the CRM system was analyzed. The results from the research reveal that the utilization strategy of FIS does not affect the ability of FIS use, but technological level and educational level have an effect on the ability of FIS use. The ability of FIS use has influence on the intention of franchising companies about the implementation of the CRM system.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.91-108
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• 2003

The number of companies which use Internet and Web grow at an explosive rate and most of them made use of the Web sites for business activity such as publicity, advertising, customer support, and online retailing. However, there are very few empirical studies on web sites evaluation based on theoretical framework. The primary purpose of this study is to evaluate motivational effectiveness of Web sites using the WebMAC Business instrument. In this paper, we introduced a lot of Web sites evaluation studies and several IS studies based on the motivation theory. Web sites evaluation was performed by four motivational factors which include stimulating, meaningful, organized, and easy-to-use. There are significant differences among the industry type about motivational factors. This study identifies areas for improvement of existing Web sites and suggests several guidelines for development of Web sites from the user's perspective.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1-19
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• 2008

This study investigated the international transfer of retail know-how via the prism of Learning Organizational Theory. As a case, 7-Eleven, a worldwide chain of convenience stores was examined. Its international transfer of retail know-how occurred when 7-Eleven, originally founded by Southland Corporation in Dallas, Texas, was introduced in Japan in 1973 in the form of 7-Eleven Japan. Our analysis shows that both strategic core learning and adaptive learning played a significant role during the international transfer of retail know-how. Our findings reveal the evidence of the following elements of strategic core learning such as the convenience store concept, the three principles of store management, the minimum profit guarantee system, and the margin-based royalty system. On the other hand, the retailing mix such as store type, store location, store size, and merchandising acted as the acting agents of adaptive learning. The hypothesis verification methods acted as the main methods for adaptive learning. Through the persistent adaptive learning, inimitable innovations could be brought forth. However, the elements of strategic core learning should provide the direction for the adaptive learning.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.68-92
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• 1995

Recentry the structure of the retail trade have been chanaed with its environmantal changes. Some studies may be necessary on the changing process of environment and fundamental structure analyses of the retail trade. This study analyzes the location of retail trades, inhabitants' behavior in retail tredes and their desirable utilization scheme of them in Kwangju-si. Some study methods, contents and coming-out results are as follows: 1. Retail trades can be classified into independent stores, chain-stores (supermarket, voluntary chain and frenchiise system and convenience store), department stores, cooperative associations, traditional, markets mail-order marketing, automatic vending and others by service levels, selling-items, prices, managements, methods of retailing and store or nonstore type. 2. In Kwangju, the environment of retail trades is related to the consumers of population structure: chanes in consumers pattern, trends toward agings and nuclear family, increase of leisur: time and female advances to society. Rapid structural shift in retail trade has also been occurred due to these social changes. Traditionl and premodern markets until 1970s altere to supermarkets or department stores in 1980s, and various types, large enterprises and foreign capitals came into being in 1990s. 3. The locational characteristics of retail trades are resulted from the spatial analysis of the total population distribution, and from the calculation of segregation index in the light of potential demand. The densely-populated areas occurs in newly-built apartment housing complex which is distributed with a ring-shaped pattern around the old urban core. The numbers and rates of the aged over sixty in Kwangsan-gu and the circumference area of Mt.Moodeung, are larger and higher where rural elements are remarkable. A relation between population distribution and retail trade are analysed by the index of population per shop. The index of the population number per shop is lower in urban center, as a whole, being more convenient for consumers. In newly-formed apartment complex areas, on the other, the index more than 1,000 per shop, meeting not the demands for consumers. Because both the younger and the aged are numerous in these areas, the retail trade pattern pertinent to both are needed. Urban fringes including Kwangsan-gu and the vicinity of Mt.Moodeung have some problems owing to the most of population number per shop (more than 1, 500) and the most extensive as well. 4. The regional characteristic of retail trade is analyzed through the location quotient of shops by locational patterns and centerality index. Chungkum-dong is the highest-order central place in CBD. It is the core of retail trades, which has higher-ordered specialty store including three big department stores, supermarkets and large stores. Taegum-dong, Chungsu-dong, Taeui-dong, and Numun-dong that are neiahbored to Chungkum-dong fall on the second group. They have a central commercial section where large chain stores, specialty shopping streets, narrow-line retailing shops (furniture, amusement service, and gallary), supermarkets and daily markets are located. The third group is formed on the axis of state roads linking to Naju-kun, Changseong-kun, Tamyang-kun, Hwasun-kun and forme-Songjeong-eup. It is related to newly, rising apartment housing complex along a trunk road, and characterized by markets and specialty stores. The fourth group has neibourhood-shopping centers including older residential area and Songjeong-eup area with independent stores and supermarkets as main retailing functions. The last group contains inner residential area and outer part of a city including Songjeong-eup. Outer part of miscellaneous shops being occasionally found is rural rather than urban (Fig. 7). 5. The residents' behaviors using retail trade are analyzed by factors of goods and facilities. Department stores are very high level in preference for higher-order shopping-goods such as clothes for full dress in view of both diversity and quality of goods(28.9%). But they have severe traffic congestions, and high competitions for market ranges caused by their sma . 64.0% of respondents make combined purpose trips together with banking and shopping. 6. For more efficiency of retail-trading, it is necessary to induce spatial distribution policy with regard to opportunity frequency of goods selection by central place, frontier regions and age groups. Also we must consider to analyze competition among different types of retail trade and analyze the consumption behaviors of working females and younger-aged groups, in aspects of time and space. Service improvement and the rationalization of management should be accomplished in such as cooperative location (situation) must be under consideration in relations to other functions such as finance, leisure & sports, and culture centers. Various service systems such as installment, credit card and peremium ticket, new used by enterprises, must also be carried service improvement. The rationalization and professionalization in for the commercial goods are bsically requested.

• Proceedings of the Korean DIstribution Association Conference
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• 2007.08a
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• pp.159-186
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• 2007

In today's world, the ability to adapt to the rapidly changing environment is fundamental to the survival and success of any organizations. This is particularly true for the Korean retailing industry which is in the throe of sweeping developments. Against the backdrop of an increasing importance of the environmental factors, it is imperative to look into what efforts are required of corporate enterprises in order to achieve successful long-term partnerships between and among the parties involved in the retail value chain. In spite of the critical importance of the need to understand the environmental factors and their influences on the retail value chain, a serious theoretical and empirical study into this subject has never been conducted. Moreover, previous research has overlooked the various mechanisms influencing the value chain in terms of ,control strategy' and 'control structure'. The purpose of this study is to investigate the direct and indirect modes of influences environmental dynamism exerts on opportunism, one of important relationship factors. This study particularly delves into the indirect modes of influence in terms of control strategy (control mechanism) and control structure (bureaucratic structuring). To this end, a survey research has been conducted of 200 suppliers in business relationships with Korean hypermarket retailers. The survey results show that environmental dynamism has a positive correlation with the opportunism of suppliers. In addition, the control mechanisms such as monitoring and incentives employed by retailers, in turn, have an indirect influence on the opportunism of suppliers. In other words, the monitoring of retailers has a positive correlation with the opportunism of suppliers, while the use of bureaucratic structuring has a negative correlation with opportunism. This study discusses how both retailers and their suppliers should respond to the domestic retail business environment with highly dynamic characteristics, in order to achieve a long-term win-win partnership with one another. It also presents ideas to retailers with regard to what kinds of management strategies and management efforts required to effectively control the opportunism of suppliers.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.195-227
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• 2011

There is no doubt that distribution channels and services greatly satisfy consumers' desires. Lots of products and services, stimulate consumers to purchase products to relieve their depressed feeling/stress temporarily, leading them gradually to a shopping addiction. Shopping addiction generates lots of problems, damaging not only consumers themselves but also other consumers and the entire society. Therefore, the purposes of this study were 1) to examine psychological factors that affected addictive shopping orientation of consumers, 2) to explore the effects addictive shopping orientation on the post-purchase emotions(positive emotion/negative emotion), 3) to examine the effect of post-purchase emotions on post-purchase behaviors (repurchasing/refund and exchange/negative word of mouth). 4) the study explored the differences in terms of effects of addictive shopping orientations on post-purchase emotions and behaviors, depending on the retailing channel (online and off line). The study performed a questionnaire survey for female adults older than 18 years old, living Seoul and Pusan areas. By using 404 copies for questionnaires, factor analysis, reliability analysis, and Amos 7.0 were used for the data analysis. It was found that psychological variables, self-esteem, compensatory buying and impulsiveness, had significant effects on addictive shopping orientations. Addictive shopping orientations affect both positive and negative post-purchase emotions in case of off-line shopping. Negative post-purchase emotions have higher impact on the postpurchase behaviors than positive post-purchase emotions.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.620-626
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• 2004

For general nonlinear processes, it is difficult to control with a linear model-based control method and nonlinear controls are considered. Among the numerous approaches suggested, the most rigorous approach is to use dynamic optimization. Many general engineering problems like control, scheduling, planning etc. are expressed by functional optimization problem and most of them can be changed into dynamic programming (DP) problems. However the DP problems are used in just few cases because as the size of the problem grows, the dynamic programming approach is suffered from the burden of calculation which is called as 'curse of dimensionality'. In order to avoid this problem, the Neuro-Dynamic Programming (NDP) approach is proposed by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis (1996). To get the solution of seriously nonlinear process control, the interest in NDP approach is enlarged and NDP algorithm is applied to diverse areas such as retailing, finance, inventory management, communication networks, etc. and it has been extended to chemical engineering parts. In the NDP approach, we select the optimal control input policy to minimize the value of cost which is calculated by the sum of current stage cost and future stages cost starting from the next state. The cost value is related with a weight square sum of error and input movement. During the calculation of optimal input policy, if the approximate cost function by using simulation data is utilized with Bellman iteration, the burden of calculation can be relieved and the curse of dimensionality problem of DP can be overcome. It is very important issue how to construct the cost-to-go function which has a good approximate performance. The neural network is one of the eager learning methods and it works as a global approximator to cost-to-go function. In this algorithm, the training of neural network is important and difficult part, and it gives significant effect on the performance of control. To avoid the difficulty in neural network training, the lazy learning method like k-nearest neighbor method can be exploited. The training is unnecessary for this method but requires more computation time and greater data storage. The pH neutralization process has long been taken as a representative benchmark problem of nonlin ar chemical process control due to its nonlinearity and time-varying nature. In this study, the NDP algorithm was applied to pH neutralization process. At first, the pH neutralization process control to use NDP algorithm was performed through simulations with various approximators. The global and local approximators are used for NDP calculation. After that, the verification of NDP in real system was made by pH neutralization experiment. The control results by NDP algorithm was compared with those by the PI controller which is traditionally used, in both simulations and experiments. From the comparison of results, the control by NDP algorithm showed faster and better control performance than PI controller. In addition to that, the control by NDP algorithm showed the good results when it applied to the cases with disturbances and multiple set point changes.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.113-132
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• 2007

Price rigidity involves prices that do not change with the regularity predicted by standard economic theory. It is of long-standing interest for firms, industries and the economy as a whole. However, due to the difficulty of measuring price rigidity and price adjustments directly, only a few studies have attempted to provide empirical evidence for explanatory theories from Economics and Marketing. This paper proposes and validates a research model to examine different theories of price rigidity and to predict what variables can explain the observed empirical regularities and variations in price adjustment patterns of Internet-based retailers. I specify and test a model using more than 3 million daily observations on 385 books, 118 DVDs and 154 CDs, sold by 22 Internet-based retailers that were collected over a 676-day period from March 2003 to February 2005. I obtained a number of interesting findings from the estimation of our logit model. First, quality seems to play a role-I find that both price levels as proxies for store quality, and information on the quality of a product consumers have, affect online price rigidity. Second, greater competition(i.e., less industry concentration) leads to less price rigidity(i.e., more price changes) on the Internet. I also find that Internet-based sellers more frequently change the prices of popular products, and the sellers with broader product coverage change prices less frequently, which seem due to economic forces faced by these Internet-based sellers. To the best of my knowledge, this research is the first to empirically assess price rigidity patterns for multiple industries in Internet-based retailing, and attempt to explain the variation in these patterns. I found that price changes are more likely to be driven by quality, competitive and economic considerations. These results speak to both the IS and economics literatures. To the IS literature these results suggest we take economic considerations into account in more sophisticated ways. The existence and variation in price rigidity argue that simplistic assumptions about frictionless and completely flexible digital prices do not capture the richness of pricing behavior on the Internet. The quality, competitive and economic forces identified in this model suggest promising directions for future theoretical and empirical work on their role in these technologically changing markets. To the economics literature these results offer new evidence on the sources of price rigidity, which can then be incorporated into the development of models of pricing at the firm, industry and even macro-economic level of analysis. It also suggests that there is much to be learned through interdisciplinary research between the IS, economics and related business disciplines.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.101-111
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• 2014

Purpose - This study aims to verify the construct of the service quality suitable to the characteristics of the business center, to develop the scale that can measure the service quality objectively, compare the diverse business centers in Korea, and present desirable methods of business center management and operation. Research design, data, and methodology - In the first stage, literature research and focus group interviews with current users and actual business experts of business centers were conducted. In addition, 69 early stage scale items were derived. In the second stage, a Delphi survey was conducted on the experts of business and academic circles. The measurement items in the early stage were supplemented and revised. The content validity rate (CVR) of 69 measures was computed and then the experts' opinions were used. As a result, the business center service quality scale, made up of 9 organizing factors and 36 measurement items, was constructed. In the third stage, a survey was conducted on the occupants who were currently using the business center. It was to confirm if the developed business center service quality scale could be actually utilized. The data of 435 samples collected were used. To refine the scale items, the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted repeatedly. Results - The business center service quality scale, made up of 8 factors and 33 items, was developed again. The 8 factors are reliability, speed, kindness, specialty, responsibility, appearance, convenience, and public interest. The reliability coefficient (Cronbach's Alpha) of each factor is greater than .7. Thus, it was confirmed that there was reliability in the measurement items. Further, the model suitability was verified using the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and the convergent validity and the discriminant validity were verified. This proved the construct validity. Through this process, the Korea Business Center Service Quality Scale was developed. Based on factor analysis, the developed business center service quality (BCSQ) scale consists of 4 aspects, 8 factors, and 33 items, comprising the "process quality" aspect: reliability (3 items), speediness (4 items), kindness (3 items) factors, the outcome quality aspect: expertise (3 items), responsibility (5 items) factors, the environment quality aspect: appearance (5 items), convenience (3 items) factors, and the public interest aspect: public interest (7 items) factor. However, according to CFA, the BCSQ scale consists of a total of 4 aspects, 8 factors, and 33 items, comprising the "process quality" aspect: reliability (3 items), speediness (3 items), kindness (3 items) factors, the outcome quality aspect: expertise (2 items), responsibility (4 items) factors, the environment quality aspect: appearance (3 items), convenience (2 items) factors, and the public interest aspect: public interest (3 items) factor. Conclusions - The BCSQ scale could serve as a diagnostic tool that will allow business center managers to determine service areas that are weak and in need of attention, and to improve the service quality of the business center.