• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.119-138
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• 2016

Since the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production and mass distribution of standardized goods possible, machine-made (manufactured) products have accounted for the majority of the market. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of purchasing even more expensive handmade products has become a noticeable trend as consumers have started to acknowledge the value of handmade products, such as the craftsman's commitment, belief in their quality and scarcity, and the sense of self-esteem from having them,. Consumer interest in these handmade products has shown explosive growth and has been coupled with the recent development of three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies. Etsy.com is the world's largest online handmade platform. It is no different from any other online platform; it provides an online market where buyers and sellers virtually meet to share information and transact business. However, Etsy.com is different in that shops within this platform only deal with handmade products in a variety of categories, ranging from jewelry to toys. Since its establishment in 2005, despite being limited to handmade products, Etsy.com has enjoyed rapid growth in membership, transaction volume, and revenue. Most recently in April 2015, it raised funds through an initial public offering (IPO) of more than 1.8 billion USD, which demonstrates the huge potential of online handmade platforms. After the success of Etsy.com, various types of online handmade platforms such as Handmade at Amazon, ArtFire, DaWanda, and Craft is ART have emerged and are now competing with each other, at the same time, which has increased the size of the market. According to Deloitte's 2015 holiday survey on which types of gifts the respondents plan to buy during the holiday season, about 16% of U.S. consumers chose "homemade or craft items (e.g., Etsy purchase)," which was the same rate as those for the computer game and shoes categories. This indicates that consumer interests in online handmade platforms will continue to rise in the future. However, this high interest in the market for handmade products and their platforms has not yet led to academic research. Most extant studies have only focused on machine-made products and intelligent services for them. This indicates a lack of studies on handmade products and their intelligent services on virtual platforms. Therefore, this study used signaling theory and prior research on the effects of sellers' characteristics on their performance (e.g., total sales and price premiums) in the buyer-seller relationship to identify the key influencing e-Image factors (e.g., reputation, size, information sharing, and length of relationship). Then, their impacts on the performance of shops within the online handmade platform were empirically examined; the dataset was collected from Etsy.com through the application of web harvesting technology. The results from the structural equation modeling revealed that the reputation, size, and information sharing have significant effects on the total sales, while the reputation and length of relationship influence price premiums. This study extended the online platform research into online handmade platform research by identifying key influencing e-Image factors on within-platform shop's total sales and price premiums based on signaling theory and then performed a statistical investigation. These findings are expected to be a stepping stone for future studies on intelligent online handmade services as well as handmade products themselves. Furthermore, the findings of the study provide online handmade platform operators with practical guidelines on how to implement intelligent online handmade services. They should also help shop managers build their marketing strategies in a more specific and effective manner by suggesting key influencing e-Image factors. The results of this study should contribute to the vitalization of intelligent online handmade services by providing clues on how to maximize within-platform shops' total sales and price premiums.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.1-13
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• 2014

This study is preliminary founding start-ups of restaurant entrepreneurs to study the characteristics of management in order to provide useful information was studied. Survey period is from 2013 March 15 to August 31. About the nature of the preparation and establishment founder findings restaurant entrepreneurs of Western Gyeongnam area were most often in the form of an independent establishment has been compiled, work experience and other industries operating experience was more than restaurant entrepreneurs of operating experience. Hypothesis Testing in accordance with results of this study are as follows. First, the 50 founders than 30 founders quickly when the customer complaint or that service, order food and non-food note is issued after obtaining the order or that provide food, no customer is often inconvenient check the sharing services, such as personnel activities were devoting a lot of effort. Second, the re-startups restaurant entrepreneurs than new startups restaurant entrepreneurs was founded after the founder of career-related customer complaints about food more active coping was, and re-startups restaurant entrepreneurs by the founder other than business founded by the founder of the food-related customer complaints more aggressively for coping, respectively. Third, restaurant entrepreneurs of the store operations management has integrity, words and actions match, such as the degree of belief in the promise of reliability and the possibility of failure, which means the degree of recognition and response efforts are having an impact deal. Fourth, restaurant of food service management services and after-sales service has impact on the founder of the self-efficacy and self-efficacy of pre-service features and reliability founder affecting. Fifth, the revenue of the restaurant for dealing with customer complaints management includes efforts are having an impact. Sixth, restaurant founder of reliability and customer care has influenced the self-efficacy. Seventh, management of operational management activities have a positive impact on business performance are.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.12 no.9
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• pp.156-171
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• 2012

It is the time of the Korean Wave booming throughout the world, placing Korean culture in the center of the world and its added value is unaccountable. At this prosperity, the preserving of the archetype of Korean dancing and digital contents making is becoming a task not only for the government but also for the private sector because culture industry has enormous added values. To achieve such goals, contents development is an urgent matter but establishing the value of the archetype of Korean traditional dancing must have priority. The public has to take an active role in rediscovering the values of traditional culture, and as the representative of Korean identity traditional dancing must be the object of a systematic art policy. This study will review the current status of 'digital contents program of the archetype of culture' for traditional dancing and will reconsider the modern value of preserving the archetype of culture to make a suggestion to the direction of culture art policies in the near future. The study acknowledged the lack of technical personnel majoring in the archetype of traditional dancing and the need of reviewing the credibility of historical research procedures. Even with the studies by industry-university collaboration and positioning of specialists, effective policies that will form the foundation for private firms to train personnels is in urgent need. In other words, training personnels, allocation of resource, securing funds, policies promoting collaboration between private and individual businesses, and the commercial recognition at private firms are still far from establishing. This is due to the fact that archetype of culture is not a business that creates revenue immediately, therefore the recognition of traditional dancing as an investable item by business-oriented firms or movements are difficult to find. To overcome such situation, software oriented policies that establish open communication and sharing with the public should be done at first rather than the quantity oriented hardware policies of contents development. Through this process the public can change the attitude on traditional dancing and traditional dancing could be newly recognized as a creative repository of culture and as public businesses giving birth to economic value.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.123-138
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• 2016

This study investigates intents of acquisitions in information technology industries. Mergers and acquisitions are a strategic decision at corporate-level and have been an important tool for a firm to grow. Plenty of firms in information technology industries have acquired startups to increase production efficiency, expand customer base, or improve quality over the last decades. For example, Google has made about 200 acquisitions since 2001, Cisco has acquired about 210 firms since 1993, Oracle has made about 125 acquisitions since 1994, and Microsoft has acquired about 200 firms since 1987. Although there have been many existing papers that theoretically study intents or motivations of acquisitions, there are limited papers that empirically investigate them mainly because it is challenging to measure and quantify intents of M&As. This study examines the intent of acquisitions by measuring specific intents for M&A transactions. Using our measures of acquisition intents, we compare the intents by four acquisition types: (1) the acquisition where a hardware firm acquires a hardware firm, (2) the acquisition where a hardware firm acquires a software/IT service firm, (3) the acquisition where a software/IT service firm acquires a hardware firm, and (4) the acquisition where a software /IT service firm acquires a software/IT service firm. We presume that there are difference in reasons why a hardware firm acquires another hardware firm, why a hardware firm acquires a software firm, why a software/IT service firm acquires a hardware firm, and why a software/IT service firm acquires another software/IT service firm. Using data of the M&As in US IT industries, we identified major intents of the M&As. The acquisition intents are identified based on the press release of M&A announcements and measured with four categories. First, an acquirer may have intents of cost saving in operations by sharing common resources between the acquirer and the target. The cost saving can accrue from economies of scope and scale. Second, an acquirer may have intents of product enhancement/development. Knowledge and skills transferred from the target may enable the acquirer to enhance the product quality or to expand product lines. Third, an acquirer may have intents of gain additional customer base to expand the market, to penetrate the market, or to enter a foreign market. Fourth, a firm may acquire a target with intents of expanding customer channels. By complementing existing channel to the customer, the firm can increase its revenue. Our results show that acquirers have had intents of cost saving more in acquisitions between hardware companies than in acquisitions between software companies. Hardware firms are more likely to acquire with intents of product enhancement or development than software firms. Overall, the intent of product enhancement/development is the most frequent intent in all of the four acquisition types, and the intent of customer base expansion is the second. We also analyze our data with the classification of production-side intents and customer-side intents, which is based on activities of the value chain of a firm. Intents of cost saving operations and those of product enhancement/development can be viewed as production-side intents and intents of customer base expansion and those of expanding customer channels can be viewed as customer-side intents. Our analysis shows that the ratio between the number of customer-side intents and that of production-side intents is higher in acquisitions where a software firm is an acquirer than in the acquisitions where a hardware firm is an acquirer. This study can contribute to IS literature. First, this study provides insights in understanding M&As in IT industries by answering for question of why an IT firm intends to another IT firm. Second, this study also provides distribution of acquisition intents for acquisition types.

• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.99-147
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• 2016

This paper critically reviews the previous discussion over public engagement with science and technology by Science and Technology Studies literatures with a focus on justification and acceptance. Recent studies pointed out that the "participatory turn" after the late 1990s was followed by confusion and disagreement over the meaning and agency of public engagement. Their discussion over the reproduction of the ever-present boundary between science and society along with so-called late modernity and post-normal science and sometimes through the very processes of public engagement draws fresh attention to the old problem: how can lay participation in decision-making be justified, even if we agree that privileging the position of experts in governance of science and technology is no longer justified? So far STS have focused on two conditions for participatory turn-1) uncertainties inherent in experts' ways of knowing and 2) practicability of lay knowledge. This paper first explicated why such discussion has not been logically sufficient nor successful in promoting a wide and well-thought-out acceptance of public engagement. Then the paper made a preliminary attempt to explain what new types of expertise can support the construction and sustainment of participatory governance in science and technology by focusing on one case of lay participation. The particular case discussed by the paper revolves around the actions of a civil organization and an activist who led legal and regulatory changes in wind power development in Jeju Special Self-governing Province. The paper analyzed the types of expertise constructed to be effective and legitimate during the constitution of participatory energy governance and the local society's support for it. The arguments of this paper can be summarized as follows. First, an appropriate basis of the normative claim that science and technology governance should make participatory turn cannot be drawn from the essential characteristics of lay publics-as little as of experts. Second, the type of 'expertise' which can justify participatory governance can only be constructed a posteriori as a result of the practices to re-construct the boundaries between factual statements and value judgment. Third, an intermediary expertise, which this paper defines as a type of expertise in forming human-nonhuman associations and their new pathways for circulations, made significant contribution in laying out the legal and regulatory foundation for revenue sharing in Jeju wind power development. Fourth, experts' conventional ways of knowing need to be supplemented, not supplanted, by lay expertise. Ultimately, the paper calls for the necessity to extend STS discussion over governance toward following the actors. What needs more thorough analysis is such actors' narratives and practices to re-construct the boundaries between the past and present, facts and values, science and society. STS needs a renewed focus on the actual sites of conflicts and decision-making in discussing participatory governance.