• Title/Summary/Keyword: Two-way search System

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An Optimal Conjunctive Operation of Water Transmission Systems from Multiple Sources with applying EPAnet and KModSim Model (KModSim 모형(模型)에 의한 도시지역(都市地域) 다중수원(多衆水源) 송수관망간(送水管網間) 최적(最適) 연계(連繫) 운영(運營) 연구(硏究))

  • Ryu, Tae-Sang;Cheong, Tae-Sung;Ko, Ick-Hwan;Ha, Sung-Ryong
    • Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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    • 2008.05a
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    • pp.500-504
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    • 2008
  • The objective of this paper is to evaluate the feasibility of using an optimization model as a effective way to search conjunctive operation scheme to meet two conditions; one is to minimize the electric cost for pumping and another is to meet the water demand for satisfying customers. The feasibility is confirmed as comparing the best combinations of pumps between multi-regional water supply networks from multiple sources which are obtained through an optimization modeling and EPAnet modeling. KModsim model, a network optimization model, was used to determine conjunctive operation scheme in the pipe system. KModsim, based on Lagrangian Relaxation algorithm, is useful for modeling network system and obtaining simultaneously pump combination and water allocation with given input option such as energy unit cost supplying from a source into a consumer, operating pumping combination. This study develops the procedure of determining optimal conjunctive operation scheme with using KModsim model. As a study region, the water supplying systems of the Geojae-city in the Geongsang Namdo Province was selected and investigated. The EPAnet hydraulic simulation result(Ryu et al, 2007, KSWW) gave input data for optimization model; energy unit price(won/$m^3$), water service available area etc.. It was assured that the combination of pump operation through optimum conjunctive operation is to be optimum scheme to obtain the best economic water allocation with comparison to the hydraulic simulation result such as electric cost and pump combination cases. The results obtained through the study are as follows. First, It was found that a well-allocated water supply scheme, the best combination of pump operation through optimum joint operation, promises to save the electric cost and satisfy all operational goals such as stability and revenues during the period. Second, an application of KModSim, a network model, gave the amount of water allocation from each source to a consumer with consideration of economic supply. Finally, in a service area available to supply through conjunctive operation of existing inter-regional water supply networks within short distance, a conjunctive operation is useful for determining each transmission pipeline's service area and maximizing the effectiveness of optimizations in pumping operation time.

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Methodological Quality Evaluation of a Meta-Analysis Study of Rehabilitation Treatment Interventions for Stroke Patients in Korea Applying AMSTAR-2: Focusing on Upper Extremity Function and Recovery of Daily Life (AMSTAR-2를 적용한 국내 뇌졸중 환자의 재활치료 중재 메타분석 연구의 방법론적 질 평가: 상지기능과 일상생활회복을 중심으로)

  • Hwang, Ho-Sung;Ham, Min-Joo
    • The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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    • v.22 no.8
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    • pp.660-670
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    • 2022
  • This study was analyzed by applying AMSTAR-2, a methodological quality evaluation tool, to evaluate the quality of domestic meta-analysis papers on rehabilitation interventions for stroke patients. The purpose of this study is to provide guidelines for qualitative improvement of evidence-based practice and meta-analysis research by analyzing the qualitative level of the analyzed research. The literature search was conducted using the Research Information Sharing Service, Korean Medical database, and Korean studies Information Service System. Two authors searched, extracted, and reviewed literature using the keywords 'stroke' and 'meta-analysis'. As a result of the AMSTAR-2 quality evaluation of the final 18 studies, 3 studies (16.67%) were 'Moderate', 8 studies (44.44%) were 'Low', and 7 studies (38.89%) were 'Critically Low'. In future research, scientific and objective data selection and extraction process should be performed. It is expected that interest and efforts to improve the quality of meta-analysis research will continue by referring to the contents analyzed in this study as a way to improve the quality of literature.

Design and Implementation of Two-way Jini Adaptor for Interoperability between heterogeneous Networks (이질의 네트워크 간의 상호운용을 위한 양방향 지니 어댑터 설계 및 구현)

  • Oh, Il-Jin;Hwang, Yun-Young;Lee, Kyu-Chul
    • Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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    • v.14 no.9
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    • pp.864-875
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    • 2008
  • The advent of the ubiquitous environments, the sub-networks is various to offer ubiquitous environments. There are diversify sub-networks such as Jini, UPnP, DPWS. To realize ubiquitous, any users can discovery and services in any sub-networks. However, they cannot support these requirement, because they don't do interoperability with other networks. In this paper, we introduce a Jini adaptor of WSUN(Web Services on Universal Networks). The WSUN is the framework which supports interoperability through the intermediation of Web services. The Jini adaptor has there roles: Lookup Service, Jini Client, Web Service Client. It converts Jini services to Web services and registers them. to UDDI registry. In addition the Jini adaptor process the events which happening in Jini system then that is utilized when another sub-network client search a service. Because the adaptor updates a service status continuously, it is possible that provides a service discovery and use to apply the status information. In conclusion, a Jini client is able to find and use a service which exists in heterogeneous sub-network through the Jini adaptor.

Improving Haskell GC-Tuning Time Using Divide-and-Conquer (분할 정복법을 이용한 Haskell GC 조정 시간 개선)

  • An, Hyungjun;Kim, Hwamok;Liu, Xiao;Kim, Yeoneo;Byun, Sugwoo;Woo, Gyun
    • KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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    • v.6 no.9
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    • pp.377-384
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    • 2017
  • The performance improvement of a single core processor has reached its limit since the circuit density cannot be increased any longer due to overheating. Therefore, the multicore and manycore architectures have emerged as viable approaches and parallel programming becomes more important. Haskell, a purely functional language, is getting popular in this situation since it naturally supports parallel programming owing to its beneficial features including the implicit parallelism in evaluating expressions and the monadic tools supporting parallel constructs. However, the performance of Haskell parallel programs is strongly influenced by the performance of the run-time system including the garbage collector. Though a memory profiling tool namely GC-tune has been suggested, we need a more systematic way to use this tool. Since GC-tune finds the optimal memory size by executing the target program with all the different possible GC options, the GC-tuning time takes too long. This paper suggests a basic divide-and-conquer method to reduce the number of GC-tune executions by reducing the search area by one-quarter for every searching step. Applying this method to two parallel programs, a maximally independent set and a K-means programs, the memory tuning time is reduced by 7.78 times with accuracy 98% on average.

Deleterious Effects of Shift Work in the Realm of Cognitive and Behavioral Domains : A Critical Review (인지 및 행동영역에서 교대 근무의 유해적인 영향 : 비판적 고찰)

  • Lee, Suji L.;Park, Chang-hyun;Ha, Eunji;Park, Shinwon;Hong, Haejin;Park, Su Hyun;Ma, Jiyoung;Kang, Ilhyang;Kang, Hahn;Song, William Byunghoon;Kim, Jungyoon;Kim, Jieun E.
    • Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.59-67
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    • 2017
  • Shift workers experience a disruption in the circadian sleep-wake rhythm, which brings upon adverse health effects such as fatigue, insomnia and decreased sleep quality. Moreover, shift work has deleterious effects on both work productivity and safety. In this review, we present a brief overview of the current literature on the consequences of shift work, especially focusing on attention-associated cognitive decline and related behavioral changes. We searched two electronic databases, PubMed and RISS, using key search terms related to cognitive domains, deleterious effects, and shift work. Twenty studies were eligible for the final review. The consequences of shift work can be classified into the following three categories extracted from the literature review : 1) work accidents ; 2) commuting accidents such as car accidents that occur on the way to and from work ; and 3) attendance management at work (i.e., absenteeism, tardiness, and unscheduled early departure). These cognitive and behavioral consequences of shift work were also found to be associated with sleep disorders in shift workers. Thus, improvements in the shift work system are necessary in order to enhance workers' health conditions, work productivity, and safety.

An Embedding /Extracting Method of Audio Watermark Information for High Quality Stereo Music (고품질 스테레오 음악을 위한 오디오 워터마크 정보 삽입/추출 기술)

  • Bae, Kyungyul
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.21-35
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    • 2018
  • Since the introduction of MP3 players, CD recordings have gradually been vanishing, and the music consuming environment of music users is shifting to mobile devices. The introduction of smart devices has increased the utilization of music through music playback, mass storage, and search functions that are integrated into smartphones and tablets. At the time of initial MP3 player supply, the bitrate of the compressed music contents generally was 128 Kbps. However, as increasing of the demand for high quality music, sound quality of 384 Kbps appeared. Recently, music content of FLAC (Free License Audio Codec) format using lossless compression method is becoming popular. The download service of many music sites in Korea has classified by unlimited download with technical protection and limited download without technical protection. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is used as a technical protection measure for unlimited download, but it can only be used with authenticated devices that have DRM installed. Even if music purchased by the user, it cannot be used by other devices. On the contrary, in the case of music that is limited in quantity but not technically protected, there is no way to enforce anyone who distributes it, and in the case of high quality music such as FLAC, the loss is greater. In this paper, the author proposes an audio watermarking technology for copyright protection of high quality stereo music. Two kinds of information, "Copyright" and "Copy_free", are generated by using the turbo code. The two watermarks are composed of 9 bytes (72 bits). If turbo code is applied for error correction, the amount of information to be inserted as 222 bits increases. The 222-bit watermark was expanded to 1024 bits to be robust against additional errors and finally used as a watermark to insert into stereo music. Turbo code is a way to recover raw data if the damaged amount is less than 15% even if part of the code is damaged due to attack of watermarked content. It can be extended to 1024 bits or it can find 222 bits from some damaged contents by increasing the probability, the watermark itself has made it more resistant to attack. The proposed algorithm uses quantization in DCT so that watermark can be detected efficiently and SNR can be improved when stereo music is converted into mono. As a result, on average SNR exceeded 40dB, resulting in sound quality improvements of over 10dB over traditional quantization methods. This is a very significant result because it means relatively 10 times improvement in sound quality. In addition, the sample length required for extracting the watermark can be extracted sufficiently if the length is shorter than 1 second, and the watermark can be completely extracted from music samples of less than one second in all of the MP3 compression having a bit rate of 128 Kbps. The conventional quantization method can extract the watermark with a length of only 1/10 compared to the case where the sampling of the 10-second length largely fails to extract the watermark. In this study, since the length of the watermark embedded into music is 72 bits, it provides sufficient capacity to embed necessary information for music. It is enough bits to identify the music distributed all over the world. 272 can identify $4*10^{21}$, so it can be used as an identifier and it can be used for copyright protection of high quality music service. The proposed algorithm can be used not only for high quality audio but also for development of watermarking algorithm in multimedia such as UHD (Ultra High Definition) TV and high-resolution image. In addition, with the development of digital devices, users are demanding high quality music in the music industry, and artificial intelligence assistant is coming along with high quality music and streaming service. The results of this study can be used to protect the rights of copyright holders in these industries.

Context Sharing Framework Based on Time Dependent Metadata for Social News Service (소셜 뉴스를 위한 시간 종속적인 메타데이터 기반의 컨텍스트 공유 프레임워크)

  • Ga, Myung-Hyun;Oh, Kyeong-Jin;Hong, Myung-Duk;Jo, Geun-Sik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.19 no.4
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    • pp.39-53
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    • 2013
  • The emergence of the internet technology and SNS has increased the information flow and has changed the way people to communicate from one-way to two-way communication. Users not only consume and share the information, they also can create and share it among their friends across the social network service. It also changes the Social Media behavior to become one of the most important communication tools which also includes Social TV. Social TV is a form which people can watch a TV program and at the same share any information or its content with friends through Social media. Social News is getting popular and also known as a Participatory Social Media. It creates influences on user interest through Internet to represent society issues and creates news credibility based on user's reputation. However, the conventional platforms in news services only focus on the news recommendation domain. Recent development in SNS has changed this landscape to allow user to share and disseminate the news. Conventional platform does not provide any special way for news to be share. Currently, Social News Service only allows user to access the entire news. Nonetheless, they cannot access partial of the contents which related to users interest. For example user only have interested to a partial of the news and share the content, it is still hard for them to do so. In worst cases users might understand the news in different context. To solve this, Social News Service must provide a method to provide additional information. For example, Yovisto known as an academic video searching service provided time dependent metadata from the video. User can search and watch partial of video content according to time dependent metadata. They also can share content with a friend in social media. Yovisto applies a method to divide or synchronize a video based whenever the slides presentation is changed to another page. However, we are not able to employs this method on news video since the news video is not incorporating with any power point slides presentation. Segmentation method is required to separate the news video and to creating time dependent metadata. In this work, In this paper, a time dependent metadata-based framework is proposed to segment news contents and to provide time dependent metadata so that user can use context information to communicate with their friends. The transcript of the news is divided by using the proposed story segmentation method. We provide a tag to represent the entire content of the news. And provide the sub tag to indicate the segmented news which includes the starting time of the news. The time dependent metadata helps user to track the news information. It also allows them to leave a comment on each segment of the news. User also may share the news based on time metadata as segmented news or as a whole. Therefore, it helps the user to understand the shared news. To demonstrate the performance, we evaluate the story segmentation accuracy and also the tag generation. For this purpose, we measured accuracy of the story segmentation through semantic similarity and compared to the benchmark algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms benchmark algorithms in terms of the accuracy of story segmentation. It is important to note that sub tag accuracy is the most important as a part of the proposed framework to share the specific news context with others. To extract a more accurate sub tags, we have created stop word list that is not related to the content of the news such as name of the anchor or reporter. And we applied to framework. We have analyzed the accuracy of tags and sub tags which represent the context of news. From the analysis, it seems that proposed framework is helpful to users for sharing their opinions with context information in Social media and Social news.

A Ranking Algorithm for Semantic Web Resources: A Class-oriented Approach (시맨틱 웹 자원의 랭킹을 위한 알고리즘: 클래스중심 접근방법)

  • Rho, Sang-Kyu;Park, Hyun-Jung;Park, Jin-Soo
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.17 no.4
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    • pp.31-59
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    • 2007
  • We frequently use search engines to find relevant information in the Web but still end up with too much information. In order to solve this problem of information overload, ranking algorithms have been applied to various domains. As more information will be available in the future, effectively and efficiently ranking search results will become more critical. In this paper, we propose a ranking algorithm for the Semantic Web resources, specifically RDF resources. Traditionally, the importance of a particular Web page is estimated based on the number of key words found in the page, which is subject to manipulation. In contrast, link analysis methods such as Google's PageRank capitalize on the information which is inherent in the link structure of the Web graph. PageRank considers a certain page highly important if it is referred to by many other pages. The degree of the importance also increases if the importance of the referring pages is high. Kleinberg's algorithm is another link-structure based ranking algorithm for Web pages. Unlike PageRank, Kleinberg's algorithm utilizes two kinds of scores: the authority score and the hub score. If a page has a high authority score, it is an authority on a given topic and many pages refer to it. A page with a high hub score links to many authoritative pages. As mentioned above, the link-structure based ranking method has been playing an essential role in World Wide Web(WWW), and nowadays, many people recognize the effectiveness and efficiency of it. On the other hand, as Resource Description Framework(RDF) data model forms the foundation of the Semantic Web, any information in the Semantic Web can be expressed with RDF graph, making the ranking algorithm for RDF knowledge bases greatly important. The RDF graph consists of nodes and directional links similar to the Web graph. As a result, the link-structure based ranking method seems to be highly applicable to ranking the Semantic Web resources. However, the information space of the Semantic Web is more complex than that of WWW. For instance, WWW can be considered as one huge class, i.e., a collection of Web pages, which has only a recursive property, i.e., a 'refers to' property corresponding to the hyperlinks. However, the Semantic Web encompasses various kinds of classes and properties, and consequently, ranking methods used in WWW should be modified to reflect the complexity of the information space in the Semantic Web. Previous research addressed the ranking problem of query results retrieved from RDF knowledge bases. Mukherjea and Bamba modified Kleinberg's algorithm in order to apply their algorithm to rank the Semantic Web resources. They defined the objectivity score and the subjectivity score of a resource, which correspond to the authority score and the hub score of Kleinberg's, respectively. They concentrated on the diversity of properties and introduced property weights to control the influence of a resource on another resource depending on the characteristic of the property linking the two resources. A node with a high objectivity score becomes the object of many RDF triples, and a node with a high subjectivity score becomes the subject of many RDF triples. They developed several kinds of Semantic Web systems in order to validate their technique and showed some experimental results verifying the applicability of their method to the Semantic Web. Despite their efforts, however, there remained some limitations which they reported in their paper. First, their algorithm is useful only when a Semantic Web system represents most of the knowledge pertaining to a certain domain. In other words, the ratio of links to nodes should be high, or overall resources should be described in detail, to a certain degree for their algorithm to properly work. Second, a Tightly-Knit Community(TKC) effect, the phenomenon that pages which are less important but yet densely connected have higher scores than the ones that are more important but sparsely connected, remains as problematic. Third, a resource may have a high score, not because it is actually important, but simply because it is very common and as a consequence it has many links pointing to it. In this paper, we examine such ranking problems from a novel perspective and propose a new algorithm which can solve the problems under the previous studies. Our proposed method is based on a class-oriented approach. In contrast to the predicate-oriented approach entertained by the previous research, a user, under our approach, determines the weights of a property by comparing its relative significance to the other properties when evaluating the importance of resources in a specific class. This approach stems from the idea that most queries are supposed to find resources belonging to the same class in the Semantic Web, which consists of many heterogeneous classes in RDF Schema. This approach closely reflects the way that people, in the real world, evaluate something, and will turn out to be superior to the predicate-oriented approach for the Semantic Web. Our proposed algorithm can resolve the TKC(Tightly Knit Community) effect, and further can shed lights on other limitations posed by the previous research. In addition, we propose two ways to incorporate data-type properties which have not been employed even in the case when they have some significance on the resource importance. We designed an experiment to show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and the validity of ranking results, which was not tried ever in previous research. We also conducted a comprehensive mathematical analysis, which was overlooked in previous research. The mathematical analysis enabled us to simplify the calculation procedure. Finally, we summarize our experimental results and discuss further research issues.

Business Application of Convolutional Neural Networks for Apparel Classification Using Runway Image (합성곱 신경망의 비지니스 응용: 런웨이 이미지를 사용한 의류 분류를 중심으로)

  • Seo, Yian;Shin, Kyung-shik
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.3
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    • pp.1-19
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    • 2018
  • Large amount of data is now available for research and business sectors to extract knowledge from it. This data can be in the form of unstructured data such as audio, text, and image data and can be analyzed by deep learning methodology. Deep learning is now widely used for various estimation, classification, and prediction problems. Especially, fashion business adopts deep learning techniques for apparel recognition, apparel search and retrieval engine, and automatic product recommendation. The core model of these applications is the image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). CNN is made up of neurons which learn parameters such as weights while inputs come through and reach outputs. CNN has layer structure which is best suited for image classification as it is comprised of convolutional layer for generating feature maps, pooling layer for reducing the dimensionality of feature maps, and fully-connected layer for classifying the extracted features. However, most of the classification models have been trained using online product image, which is taken under controlled situation such as apparel image itself or professional model wearing apparel. This image may not be an effective way to train the classification model considering the situation when one might want to classify street fashion image or walking image, which is taken in uncontrolled situation and involves people's movement and unexpected pose. Therefore, we propose to train the model with runway apparel image dataset which captures mobility. This will allow the classification model to be trained with far more variable data and enhance the adaptation with diverse query image. To achieve both convergence and generalization of the model, we apply Transfer Learning on our training network. As Transfer Learning in CNN is composed of pre-training and fine-tuning stages, we divide the training step into two. First, we pre-train our architecture with large-scale dataset, ImageNet dataset, which consists of 1.2 million images with 1000 categories including animals, plants, activities, materials, instrumentations, scenes, and foods. We use GoogLeNet for our main architecture as it has achieved great accuracy with efficiency in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). Second, we fine-tune the network with our own runway image dataset. For the runway image dataset, we could not find any previously and publicly made dataset, so we collect the dataset from Google Image Search attaining 2426 images of 32 major fashion brands including Anna Molinari, Balenciaga, Balmain, Brioni, Burberry, Celine, Chanel, Chloe, Christian Dior, Cividini, Dolce and Gabbana, Emilio Pucci, Ermenegildo, Fendi, Giuliana Teso, Gucci, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Leonard, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Marni, Max Mara, Missoni, Moschino, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Sonia Rykiel, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Versace, and Yve Saint Laurent. We perform 10-folded experiments to consider the random generation of training data, and our proposed model has achieved accuracy of 67.2% on final test. Our research suggests several advantages over previous related studies as to our best knowledge, there haven't been any previous studies which trained the network for apparel image classification based on runway image dataset. We suggest the idea of training model with image capturing all the possible postures, which is denoted as mobility, by using our own runway apparel image dataset. Moreover, by applying Transfer Learning and using checkpoint and parameters provided by Tensorflow Slim, we could save time spent on training the classification model as taking 6 minutes per experiment to train the classifier. This model can be used in many business applications where the query image can be runway image, product image, or street fashion image. To be specific, runway query image can be used for mobile application service during fashion week to facilitate brand search, street style query image can be classified during fashion editorial task to classify and label the brand or style, and website query image can be processed by e-commerce multi-complex service providing item information or recommending similar item.

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

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

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