• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
• /
• v.20 no.1
• /
• pp.49-58
• /
• 2010

Corporate social responsibility has become a very important issue for researchers (Greenfield, 2004; Maignan & Ralston, 2002; McWilliams et al., 2006; Pearce & Doh 2005), and many consider it necessary for businesses to define their role in society and apply social and ethical standards to their businesses (Lichtenstein et al., 2004). As a result, a significant number of retailers have adopted CSR as a strategic tool to promote their businesses. To this end, this study sought to discover U.S. consumers' attitudes and behavior in ethical purchasing and consumption based on their subjective perception and evaluation of a retailer. The objectives of this study include: 1) determine the participants awareness of retailers corporate social responsibility; 2) assess how participants evaluate retailers corporate social responsibility; 3) examine whether participants evaluation process of retailers CSR influence their attitude toward the retailer; and 4) assess if participants attitude toward the retailers CSR influence their purchase behavior. This study does not focus on actual retailers' CSR performance because a consumer's decision making process is based on an individual assessment not an actual fact. This study examines US college students' awareness and evaluations of retailers' corporate social responsibility (CSR). Fifty six college students at a major Southeastern university participated in the study. The age of the participants ranged from 18 to 26 years old. Content analysis was conducted with open coding and focused coding. Over 100 single-spaced pages of written responses were collected and analyzed. Two steps of coding (i.e., open coding and focused coding) were conducted (Esterberg, 2002). Coding results and analytic memos were used to understand participants' awareness of CSR and their ethical purchasing behavior supported through the selection and inclusion of direct quotes that were extracted from the written responses. Names used here are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality of participants. Participants were asked to write about retailers, their aware-ness of CSR issues, and to evaluate a retailer's CSR performance. A majority (n = 28) of respondents indicated their awareness of CSR but have not felt the need to act on this issue. Few (n=8) indicated that they are aware of this issue but not greatly concerned. Findings suggest that when college students evaluate retailers' CSR performance, they use three dimensions of CSR: employee support, community support, and environmental support. Employee treatment and support were found as an important criterion in evaluation of retailers' CSR. Respondents indicated that their good experience with a retailer as an employee made them have a positive perception and attitude toward the retailer. Regarding employee support four themes emerged: employee rewards and incentives based on performance, working environment, employee education and training program, and employee and family discounts. Well organized rewards and incentives were mentioned as an important attribute. The factors related to the working environment included: how well retailers follow the rules related to working hours, lunch time and breaks was also one of the most mentioned attributes. Regarding community support, three themes emerged: contributing a percentage of sales to the local community, financial contribution to charity organizations, and events for community support. Regarding environments, two themes emerged: recycling and selling organic or green products. It was mentioned in the responses that retailers are trying to do what they can to be environmentally friendly. One respondent mentioned that the company is creating stores that have an environmentally friendly design. Information about what the company does to help the environment can easily be found on the company’s website as well. Respondents have also noticed that the stores are starting to offer products that are organic and environmentally friendly. A retailer was also mentioned by a respondent in this category in reference to how the company uses eco-friendly cups and how they are helping to rebuild homes in New Orleans. The respondents noticed that a retailer offers reusable bags for their consumers to purchase. One respondent stated that a retailer uses its products to help the environment, through offering organic cotton. After thorough analysis of responses, we found that a participant's evaluation of a retailers' CSR influenced their attitudes towards retailers. However, there was a significant gap between attitudes and purchasing behavior. Although the participants had positive attitudes toward retailers CSR, the lack of funds and time influenced their purchase behavior. Overall, half (n=28) of the respondents mentioned that CSR performance affects their purchasing decisions making when shopping. Findings from this study provide support for retailers to consider their corporate social responsibility when developing their image with the consumer. This study implied that consumers evaluate retailers based on employee, community and environmental support. The evaluation, attitude and purchase behavior of consumers seem to be intertwined. That is, evaluation is based on the knowledge the consumer has of the retailers CSR. That knowledge may influence their attitude toward the retailer and thus influence their purchase behavior. Participants also indicated that having CSR makes them think highly of the retailer, but it does not influence their purchase behavior. Price and convenience seem to surpass the importance of CSR among the participants. Implications, recommendations for future research, and limitations of the study are also discussed.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.57-71
• /
• 2013

Over a billion people in the world generate new news minute by minute. People forecasts some news but most news are from unexpected events such as natural disasters, accidents, crimes. People spend much time to watch a huge amount of news delivered from many media because they want to understand what is happening now, to predict what might happen in the near future, and to share and discuss on the news. People make better daily decisions through watching and obtaining useful information from news they saw. However, it is difficult that people choose news suitable to them and obtain useful information from the news because there are so many news media such as portal sites, broadcasters, and most news articles consist of gossipy news and breaking news. User interest changes over time and many people have no interest in outdated news. From this fact, applying users' recent interest to personalized news service is also required in news service. It means that personalized news service should dynamically manage user profiles. In this paper, a content-based news recommendation system is proposed to provide the personalized news service. For a personalized service, user's personal information is requisitely required. Social network service is used to extract user information for personalization service. The proposed system constructs dynamic user profile based on recent user information of Facebook, which is one of social network services. User information contains personal information, recent articles, and Facebook Page information. Facebook Pages are used for businesses, organizations and brands to share their contents and connect with people. Facebook users can add Facebook Page to specify their interest in the Page. The proposed system uses this Page information to create user profile, and to match user preferences to news topics. However, some Pages are not directly matched to news topic because Page deals with individual objects and do not provide topic information suitable to news. Freebase, which is a large collaborative database of well-known people, places, things, is used to match Page to news topic by using hierarchy information of its objects. By using recent Page information and articles of Facebook users, the proposed systems can own dynamic user profile. The generated user profile is used to measure user preferences on news. To generate news profile, news category predefined by news media is used and keywords of news articles are extracted after analysis of news contents including title, category, and scripts. TF-IDF technique, which reflects how important a word is to a document in a corpus, is used to identify keywords of each news article. For user profile and news profile, same format is used to efficiently measure similarity between user preferences and news. The proposed system calculates all similarity values between user profiles and news profiles. Existing methods of similarity calculation in vector space model do not cover synonym, hypernym and hyponym because they only handle given words in vector space model. The proposed system applies WordNet to similarity calculation to overcome the limitation. Top-N news articles, which have high similarity value for a target user, are recommended to the user. To evaluate the proposed news recommendation system, user profiles are generated using Facebook account with participants consent, and we implement a Web crawler to extract news information from PBS, which is non-profit public broadcasting television network in the United States, and construct news profiles. We compare the performance of the proposed method with that of benchmark algorithms. One is a traditional method based on TF-IDF. Another is 6Sub-Vectors method that divides the points to get keywords into six parts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system provide useful news to users by applying user's social network information and WordNet functions, in terms of prediction error of recommended news.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.26 no.3
• /
• pp.127-147
• /
• 2020

The world is suffering from numerous human and economic losses due to the novel coronavirus infection (COVID-19). The Korean government established a strategy to overcome the national infectious disease crisis through research and development. It is difficult to find distinctive features and changes in a specific R&D field when using the existing technical classification or science and technology standard classification. Recently, a few studies have been conducted to establish a classification system to provide information about the investment research areas of infectious diseases in Korea through a comparative analysis of Korea government-funded research projects. However, these studies did not provide the necessary information for establishing cooperative research strategies among countries in the infectious diseases, which is required as an execution plan to achieve the goals of national health security and fostering new growth industries. Therefore, it is inevitable to study information services based on the classification system and classification model for establishing a national collaborative R&D strategy. Seven classification - Diagnosis_biomarker, Drug_discovery, Epidemiology, Evaluation_validation, Mechanism_signaling pathway, Prediction, and Vaccine_therapeutic antibody - systems were derived through reviewing infectious diseases-related national-funded research projects of South Korea. A classification system model was trained by combining Scopus data with a bidirectional RNN model. The classification performance of the final model secured robustness with an accuracy of over 90%. In order to conduct the empirical study, an infectious disease classification system was applied to the coronavirus-related research and development projects of major countries such as the STAR Metrics (National Institutes of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) of the United States(US), the CORDIS (Community Research & Development Information Service)of the European Union(EU), and the KAKEN (Database of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research) of Japan. It can be seen that the research and development trends of infectious diseases (coronavirus) in major countries are mostly concentrated in the prediction that deals with predicting success for clinical trials at the new drug development stage or predicting toxicity that causes side effects. The intriguing result is that for all of these nations, the portion of national investment in the vaccine_therapeutic antibody, which is recognized as an area of research and development aimed at the development of vaccines and treatments, was also very small (5.1%). It indirectly explained the reason of the poor development of vaccines and treatments. Based on the result of examining the investment status of coronavirus-related research projects through comparative analysis by country, it was found that the US and Japan are relatively evenly investing in all infectious diseases-related research areas, while Europe has relatively large investments in specific research areas such as diagnosis_biomarker. Moreover, the information on major coronavirus-related research organizations in major countries was provided by the classification system, thereby allowing establishing an international collaborative R&D projects.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
• /
• v.18
• /
• pp.9-39
• /
• 2003

The rule of the Warsaw Convention of 1929 are well known and still being all over the world. The Warsaw Convention is undoubtedly the most widely accepted private international air law treaty with some 140 countries. In the international legal system for air transportation, the Warsaw Convention has played a major role for more than half century, and has been revised many times in consideration of the rapid developments of air high technology, changes of social and economic circumstances, need for the protection of passengers. Some amendments became effective, but others are still not effective. As a result, the whole international legal system for air transportation is at past so complicated and tangled. However, the 'Warsaw system' consists of the Warsaw Convention of 1929 the Guadalajara Convention of 1961, a supplementary convention, and the following six protocols: (1) the Hague Protocol of 1955, (2) the Guatemala Protocol of 1971, (3) the Montreal Additional Protocols, No.1, (4) the Montreal Additional Protocol No.2, (5) the Montreal Additional Protocol No.3, and (6) the Montreal Additional Protocol No.4. of 1975. As a fundamental principle of the air carrier's liability in the international convention and protocols, for instance in the Warsaw Convention and the Hague Protocol, the principle of limited liability and a presumed fault system has been adopted. Subsequently, the Montreal Inter-carrier Agreement of 1966, the Guatemala City Protocol, the Montreal Additional Protocol No.3, and the Montreal Additional Protocol No. 4 of 1975 maintained the limited liability, but substituted the presumed liability system by an absolute liability, that is, strict liability system. The Warsaw System, which sets relatively low compensation limits for victims of aircraft accidents and regulates the limited liability for death and injury of air passengers, had become increasingly outdated. Japanese Airlines and Inter-carrier Agreement of International Air Transport Association in 1995 has been adopted the unlimited liability of air carrier in international flight. The IATA Inter-Carrier Agreement, in which airlines in international air transportation agree to waive the limit of damages, was long and hard in coming, but it was remarkable achievement given the political and economic realities of the world. IATA deserves enormous credit for bringing it about. The Warsaw System is controversial and questionable. In order to find rational solution to disputes between nations which adopted differing liability systems in international air transportation, we need to reform the liability of air carriers the 'Warsaw system' and fundamentally, to unify the liability system among the nations. The International Civil Aviation Organization(ICAO) will therefore reinforce its efforts to further promote a legal environment that adequately reflects the public interest and the needs of the parties involved. The ICAO Study Group met in April, 1998, together with the Drafting Committee. The time between the "Special Group on the Modernization and Consolidation of the 'Warsaw system'(SGMW)" and the Diplomatic Conference must be actively utilized to arrange for profound studies of the outstanding issues and for wide international consultations with a view to narrowing the scope of differences and preparing for a global international consensus. From 11 to 28 May 1999 the ICAO Headquarters at Montreal hosted a Diplomatic Conference convened to consider, with a view to adoption, a draft Convention intended to modernize and to integrate replace the instruments of the Warsaw system. The Council of ICAO convened this Conference under the Procedure for the Adoption of International Conventions. Some 525 participants from 121 Contracting States of ICAO attended, one non-contracting State, 11 observer delegations from international organizations, a total of 544 registered participants took part in the historic three-week conference which began on 10 May. The Conference was a success since it adopted a new Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules for International Carriage by Air. The 1999 Montreal Convention, created and signed by representatives of 52 countries at an international conference convened by ICAO at Montreal on May 28, 1999, came into effect on November 4, 2003. Representatives of 30 countries have now formally ratified the Convention under their respective national procedures and ratification of the United States, which was the 30th country to ratify, took place on September 5, 2003. Under Article 53.6 of the Montreal Convention, it enters into force on the 60th day following the deposit of the 30th instrument of ratification or acceptation. The United States' ratification was deposited with ICAO on September 5, 2003. The ICAO have succeeded in modernizing and consolidating a 70-year old system of international instruments of private international law into one legal instrument that will provide, for years to come, an adequate level of compensation for those involved in international aircraft accidents. An international diplomatic conference on air law by ICAO of 1999 succeeded in adopting a new regime for air carrier liability, replacing the Warsaw Convention and five other related legal instruments with a single convention that provided for unlimited liability in relation to passengers. Victims of international air accidents and their families will be better protected and compensated under the new Montreal Convention, which modernizes and consolidates a seventy-five year old system of international instruments of private international law into one legal instrument. A major feature of the new legal instrument is the concept of unlimited liability. Whereas the Warsaw Convention set a limit of 125,000 Gold Francs (approximately US$ 8,300) in case of death or injury to passengers, the Montreal Convention introduces a two-tier system. The first tier includes strict liability up to l00,000 Special Drawing Rights (SDR: approximately US$ 135,000), irrespective of a carrier's fault. The second tier is based on presumption of fault of a carrier and has no limit of liability. The 1999 Montreal Convention also includes the following main elements; 1. In cases of aircraft accidents, air carriers are called upon to provide advance payments, without delay, to assist entitled persons in meeting immediate economic needs; the amount of this initial payment will be subject to national law and will be deductable from the final settlement; 2. Air carriers must submit proof of insurance, thereby ensuring the availability of financial resources in cases of automatic payments or litigation; 3. The legal action for damages resulting from the death or injury of a passenger may be filed in the country where, at the time of the accident, the passenger had his or her principal and permanent residence, subject to certain conditions. The new Montreal Convention of 1999 included the 5th jurisdiction - the place of residence of the claimant. The acceptance of the 5th jurisdiction is a diplomatic victory for the US and it can be realistically expected that claimants' lawyers will use every opportunity to file the claim in the US jurisdiction - it brings advantages in the liberal system of discovery, much wider scope of compensable non-economic damages than anywhere else in the world and the jury system prone to very generous awards. 4. The facilitation in the recovery of damages without the need for lengthy litigation, and simplification and modernization of documentation related to passengers. In developing this new Montreal Convention, we were able to reach a delicate balance between the needs and interests of all partners in international civil aviation, States, the travelling public, air carriers and the transport industry. Unlike the Warsaw Convention, the threshold of l00,000 SDR specified by the Montreal Convention, as well as remaining liability limits in relation to air passengers and delay, are subject to periodic review and may be revised once every five years. The primary aim of unification of private law as well as the new Montreal Convention is not only to remove or to minimize the conflict of laws but also to avoid conflict of jurisdictions. In order to find a rational solution to disputes between nations which have adopted differing liability systems in international air transport, we need fundamentally to reform their countries's domestic air law based on the new Montreal Convention. It is a desirable and necessary for us to ratify rapidly the new Montreal Convention by the contracting states of lCAO including the Republic of Korea. According to the Korean and Japanese ideas, airlines should not only pay compensation to passengers immediately after the accident, but also the so-called 'condolence' money to the next of kin. Condolence money is a gift to help a dead person's spirit in the hereafter : it is given on account of the grief and sorrow suffered by the next of kin, and it has risen considerably over the years. The total amount of the Korean and Japanese claims in the case of death is calculated on the basis of the loss of earned income, funeral expenses and material demage (baggage etc.), plus condolence money. The economic and social change will be occurred continuously after conclusion of the new Montreal Convention. In addition, the real value of life and human right will be enhanced substantially. The amount of compensation for damage caused by aircraft accident has increased in dollar amount as well as in volume. All air carrier's liability should extend to loss of expectation of leisure activities, as well as to damage to property, and mental and physical injuries. When victims are not satisfied with the amount of the compensation for damage caused by aircraft accident for which an airline corporation is liable under the current liability system. I also would like to propose my opinion that it is reasonable and necessary for us to interpret broadly the meaning of the bodily injury on Article 17 of the new Montreal Convention so as to be included the mental injury and condolence. Furthermore, Korea and Japan has not existed the Air Transport Act regulated the civil liability of air carrier such as Air Transport Act (Luftverkehrsgestz) in Germany. It is necessary for us to enact "the Korean Air Transport Contract Act (provisional title)" in order to regulate the civil liability of air carrier including the protection of the victims and injured persons caused by aircraft accident.