• Information Systems Review
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.1-23
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• 2018

A smart phone has been widely spread around world and makes people enjoy online shopping in any time and any place. Recently it also changes the distribution environment. O2O (Online-to-Offline) service becomes new normal due to its convenience of ease shopping of product and services. O2O service market shows steady and steep growth, It is reported that, however, 80% of the businesses has been discontinued within the first year because of unstable business models, customer dissatisfaction and distrust of service. Therefore, it is very important research issue to find out influential factors promoting continuous usage intention of O2O service. Previous study shows that it only considers online characteristics and lack of analysis about offline characteristics and social impact factors. The purpose of this paper is to find out continuous usage intention factors of O2O services by literature review, case analysis, and empirical test. A comprehensive research model and related hypothesis are developed and tested by using a structural equation, Survey was carried out among users who have used O2O service including payment service for at least once. Finally 611 samples are selected out of total 813 surveys. The result shows that the model is theoretically proved and 12 out of 17 hypotheses are accepted. The contribution of this paper is that it provides a new theoretical research model about continuous usage intention factors as well as practical guidelines about promoting continuous usage and growth strategies of O2O service.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.59-83
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• 2018

With the increasing importance of sentiment analysis to grasp the needs of customers and the public, various types of deep learning models have been actively applied to English texts. In the sentiment analysis of English texts by deep learning, natural language sentences included in training and test datasets are usually converted into sequences of word vectors before being entered into the deep learning models. In this case, word vectors generally refer to vector representations of words obtained through splitting a sentence by space characters. There are several ways to derive word vectors, one of which is Word2Vec used for producing the 300 dimensional Google word vectors from about 100 billion words of Google News data. They have been widely used in the studies of sentiment analysis of reviews from various fields such as restaurants, movies, laptops, cameras, etc. Unlike English, morpheme plays an essential role in sentiment analysis and sentence structure analysis in Korean, which is a typical agglutinative language with developed postpositions and endings. A morpheme can be defined as the smallest meaningful unit of a language, and a word consists of one or more morphemes. For example, for a word '예쁘고', the morphemes are '예쁘(= adjective)' and '고(=connective ending)'. Reflecting the significance of Korean morphemes, it seems reasonable to adopt the morphemes as a basic unit in Korean sentiment analysis. Therefore, in this study, we use 'morpheme vector' as an input to a deep learning model rather than 'word vector' which is mainly used in English text. The morpheme vector refers to a vector representation for the morpheme and can be derived by applying an existent word vector derivation mechanism to the sentences divided into constituent morphemes. By the way, here come some questions as follows. What is the desirable range of POS(Part-Of-Speech) tags when deriving morpheme vectors for improving the classification accuracy of a deep learning model? Is it proper to apply a typical word vector model which primarily relies on the form of words to Korean with a high homonym ratio? Will the text preprocessing such as correcting spelling or spacing errors affect the classification accuracy, especially when drawing morpheme vectors from Korean product reviews with a lot of grammatical mistakes and variations? We seek to find empirical answers to these fundamental issues, which may be encountered first when applying various deep learning models to Korean texts. As a starting point, we summarized these issues as three central research questions as follows. First, which is better effective, to use morpheme vectors from grammatically correct texts of other domain than the analysis target, or to use morpheme vectors from considerably ungrammatical texts of the same domain, as the initial input of a deep learning model? Second, what is an appropriate morpheme vector derivation method for Korean regarding the range of POS tags, homonym, text preprocessing, minimum frequency? Third, can we get a satisfactory level of classification accuracy when applying deep learning to Korean sentiment analysis? As an approach to these research questions, we generate various types of morpheme vectors reflecting the research questions and then compare the classification accuracy through a non-static CNN(Convolutional Neural Network) model taking in the morpheme vectors. As for training and test datasets, Naver Shopping's 17,260 cosmetics product reviews are used. To derive morpheme vectors, we use data from the same domain as the target one and data from other domain; Naver shopping's about 2 million cosmetics product reviews and 520,000 Naver News data arguably corresponding to Google's News data. The six primary sets of morpheme vectors constructed in this study differ in terms of the following three criteria. First, they come from two types of data source; Naver news of high grammatical correctness and Naver shopping's cosmetics product reviews of low grammatical correctness. Second, they are distinguished in the degree of data preprocessing, namely, only splitting sentences or up to additional spelling and spacing corrections after sentence separation. Third, they vary concerning the form of input fed into a word vector model; whether the morphemes themselves are entered into a word vector model or with their POS tags attached. The morpheme vectors further vary depending on the consideration range of POS tags, the minimum frequency of morphemes included, and the random initialization range. All morpheme vectors are derived through CBOW(Continuous Bag-Of-Words) model with the context window 5 and the vector dimension 300. It seems that utilizing the same domain text even with a lower degree of grammatical correctness, performing spelling and spacing corrections as well as sentence splitting, and incorporating morphemes of any POS tags including incomprehensible category lead to the better classification accuracy. The POS tag attachment, which is devised for the high proportion of homonyms in Korean, and the minimum frequency standard for the morpheme to be included seem not to have any definite influence on the classification accuracy.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.29-45
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• 2012

Bond rating is regarded as an important event for measuring financial risk of companies and for determining the investment returns of investors. As a result, it has been a popular research topic for researchers to predict companies' credit ratings by applying statistical and machine learning techniques. The statistical techniques, including multiple regression, multiple discriminant analysis (MDA), logistic models (LOGIT), and probit analysis, have been traditionally used in bond rating. However, one major drawback is that it should be based on strict assumptions. Such strict assumptions include linearity, normality, independence among predictor variables and pre-existing functional forms relating the criterion variablesand the predictor variables. Those strict assumptions of traditional statistics have limited their application to the real world. Machine learning techniques also used in bond rating prediction models include decision trees (DT), neural networks (NN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). Especially, SVM is recognized as a new and promising classification and regression analysis method. SVM learns a separating hyperplane that can maximize the margin between two categories. SVM is simple enough to be analyzed mathematical, and leads to high performance in practical applications. SVM implements the structuralrisk minimization principle and searches to minimize an upper bound of the generalization error. In addition, the solution of SVM may be a global optimum and thus, overfitting is unlikely to occur with SVM. In addition, SVM does not require too many data sample for training since it builds prediction models by only using some representative sample near the boundaries called support vectors. A number of experimental researches have indicated that SVM has been successfully applied in a variety of pattern recognition fields. However, there are three major drawbacks that can be potential causes for degrading SVM's performance. First, SVM is originally proposed for solving binary-class classification problems. Methods for combining SVMs for multi-class classification such as One-Against-One, One-Against-All have been proposed, but they do not improve the performance in multi-class classification problem as much as SVM for binary-class classification. Second, approximation algorithms (e.g. decomposition methods, sequential minimal optimization algorithm) could be used for effective multi-class computation to reduce computation time, but it could deteriorate classification performance. Third, the difficulty in multi-class prediction problems is in data imbalance problem that can occur when the number of instances in one class greatly outnumbers the number of instances in the other class. Such data sets often cause a default classifier to be built due to skewed boundary and thus the reduction in the classification accuracy of such a classifier. SVM ensemble learning is one of machine learning methods to cope with the above drawbacks. Ensemble learning is a method for improving the performance of classification and prediction algorithms. AdaBoost is one of the widely used ensemble learning techniques. It constructs a composite classifier by sequentially training classifiers while increasing weight on the misclassified observations through iterations. The observations that are incorrectly predicted by previous classifiers are chosen more often than examples that are correctly predicted. Thus Boosting attempts to produce new classifiers that are better able to predict examples for which the current ensemble's performance is poor. In this way, it can reinforce the training of the misclassified observations of the minority class. This paper proposes a multiclass Geometric Mean-based Boosting (MGM-Boost) to resolve multiclass prediction problem. Since MGM-Boost introduces the notion of geometric mean into AdaBoost, it can perform learning process considering the geometric mean-based accuracy and errors of multiclass. This study applies MGM-Boost to the real-world bond rating case for Korean companies to examine the feasibility of MGM-Boost. 10-fold cross validations for threetimes with different random seeds are performed in order to ensure that the comparison among three different classifiers does not happen by chance. For each of 10-fold cross validation, the entire data set is first partitioned into tenequal-sized sets, and then each set is in turn used as the test set while the classifier trains on the other nine sets. That is, cross-validated folds have been tested independently of each algorithm. Through these steps, we have obtained the results for classifiers on each of the 30 experiments. In the comparison of arithmetic mean-based prediction accuracy between individual classifiers, MGM-Boost (52.95%) shows higher prediction accuracy than both AdaBoost (51.69%) and SVM (49.47%). MGM-Boost (28.12%) also shows the higher prediction accuracy than AdaBoost (24.65%) and SVM (15.42%)in terms of geometric mean-based prediction accuracy. T-test is used to examine whether the performance of each classifiers for 30 folds is significantly different. The results indicate that performance of MGM-Boost is significantly different from AdaBoost and SVM classifiers at 1% level. These results mean that MGM-Boost can provide robust and stable solutions to multi-classproblems such as bond rating.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.155-175
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• 2017

As social data become into the spotlight, mainstream web search engines provide data indicate how many people searched specific keyword: Web Search Traffic data. Web search traffic information is collection of each crowd that search for specific keyword. In a various area, web search traffic can be used as one of useful variables that represent the attention of common users on specific interests. A lot of studies uses web search traffic data to nowcast or forecast social phenomenon such as epidemic prediction, consumer pattern analysis, product life cycle, financial invest modeling and so on. Also web search traffic data have begun to be applied to predict tourist inbound. Proper demand prediction is needed because tourism is high value-added industry as increasing employment and foreign exchange. Among those tourists, especially Chinese tourists: Youke is continuously growing nowadays, Youke has been largest tourist inbound of Korea tourism for many years and tourism profits per one Youke as well. It is important that research into proper demand prediction approaches of Youke in both public and private sector. Accurate tourism demands prediction is important to efficient decision making in a limited resource. This study suggests improved model that reflects latest issue of society by presented the attention from group of individual. Trip abroad is generally high-involvement activity so that potential tourists likely deep into searching for information about their own trip. Web search traffic data presents tourists' attention in the process of preparation their journey instantaneous and dynamic way. So that this study attempted select key words that potential Chinese tourists likely searched out internet. Baidu-Chinese biggest web search engine that share over 80%- provides users with accessing to web search traffic data. Qualitative interview with potential tourists helps us to understand the information search behavior before a trip and identify the keywords for this study. Selected key words of web search traffic are categorized by how much directly related to "Korean Tourism" in a three levels. Classifying categories helps to find out which keyword can explain Youke inbound demands from close one to far one as distance of category. Web search traffic data of each key words gathered by web crawler developed to crawling web search data onto Baidu Index. Using automatically gathered variable data, linear model is designed by multiple regression analysis for suitable for operational application of decision and policy making because of easiness to explanation about variables' effective relationship. After regression linear models have composed, comparing with model composed traditional variables and model additional input web search traffic data variables to traditional model has conducted by significance and R squared. after comparing performance of models, final model is composed. Final regression model has improved explanation and advantage of real-time immediacy and convenience than traditional model. Furthermore, this study demonstrates system intuitively visualized to general use -Youke Mining solution has several functions of tourist decision making including embed final regression model. Youke Mining solution has algorithm based on data science and well-designed simple interface. In the end this research suggests three significant meanings on theoretical, practical and political aspects. Theoretically, Youke Mining system and the model in this research are the first step on the Youke inbound prediction using interactive and instant variable: web search traffic information represents tourists' attention while prepare their trip. Baidu web search traffic data has more than 80% of web search engine market. Practically, Baidu data could represent attention of the potential tourists who prepare their own tour as real-time. Finally, in political way, designed Chinese tourist demands prediction model based on web search traffic can be used to tourism decision making for efficient managing of resource and optimizing opportunity for successful policy.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.127-146
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• 2017

Services using artificial intelligence have begun to emerge in daily life. Artificial intelligence is applied to products in consumer electronics and communications such as artificial intelligence refrigerators and speakers. In the financial sector, using Kensho's artificial intelligence technology, the process of the stock trading system in Goldman Sachs was improved. For example, two stock traders could handle the work of 600 stock traders and the analytical work for 15 people for 4weeks could be processed in 5 minutes. Especially, big data analysis through machine learning among artificial intelligence fields is actively applied throughout the financial industry. The stock market analysis and investment modeling through machine learning theory are also actively studied. The limits of linearity problem existing in financial time series studies are overcome by using machine learning theory such as artificial intelligence prediction model. The study of quantitative financial data based on the past stock market-related numerical data is widely performed using artificial intelligence to forecast future movements of stock price or indices. Various other studies have been conducted to predict the future direction of the market or the stock price of companies by learning based on a large amount of text data such as various news and comments related to the stock market. Investing on commodity asset, one of alternative assets, is usually used for enhancing the stability and safety of traditional stock and bond asset portfolio. There are relatively few researches on the investment model about commodity asset than mainstream assets like equity and bond. Recently machine learning techniques are widely applied on financial world, especially on stock and bond investment model and it makes better trading model on this field and makes the change on the whole financial area. In this study we made investment model using Support Vector Machine among the machine learning models. There are some researches on commodity asset focusing on the price prediction of the specific commodity but it is hard to find the researches about investment model of commodity as asset allocation using machine learning model. We propose a method of forecasting four major commodity indices, portfolio made of commodity futures, and individual commodity futures, using SVM model. The four major commodity indices are Goldman Sachs Commodity Index(GSCI), Dow Jones UBS Commodity Index(DJUI), Thomson Reuters/Core Commodity CRB Index(TRCI), and Rogers International Commodity Index(RI). We selected each two individual futures among three sectors as energy, agriculture, and metals that are actively traded on CME market and have enough liquidity. They are Crude Oil, Natural Gas, Corn, Wheat, Gold and Silver Futures. We made the equally weighted portfolio with six commodity futures for comparing with other commodity indices. We set the 19 macroeconomic indicators including stock market indices, exports & imports trade data, labor market data, and composite leading indicators as the input data of the model because commodity asset is very closely related with the macroeconomic activities. They are 14 US economic indicators, two Chinese economic indicators and two Korean economic indicators. Data period is from January 1990 to May 2017. We set the former 195 monthly data as training data and the latter 125 monthly data as test data. In this study, we verified that the performance of the equally weighted commodity futures portfolio rebalanced by the SVM model is better than that of other commodity indices. The prediction accuracy of the model for the commodity indices does not exceed 50% regardless of the SVM kernel function. On the other hand, the prediction accuracy of equally weighted commodity futures portfolio is 53%. The prediction accuracy of the individual commodity futures model is better than that of commodity indices model especially in agriculture and metal sectors. The individual commodity futures portfolio excluding the energy sector has outperformed the three sectors covered by individual commodity futures portfolio. In order to verify the validity of the model, it is judged that the analysis results should be similar despite variations in data period. So we also examined the odd numbered year data as training data and the even numbered year data as test data and we confirmed that the analysis results are similar. As a result, when we allocate commodity assets to traditional portfolio composed of stock, bond, and cash, we can get more effective investment performance not by investing commodity indices but by investing commodity futures. Especially we can get better performance by rebalanced commodity futures portfolio designed by SVM model.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.31-54
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• 2007

The exchange between buyers and sellers in the industrial market is changing from short-term to long-term relationships. Long-term relationships are governed mainly by formal contracts or informal agreements, but many scholars are now asserting that controlling relationship by using formal contracts under environmental dynamism is inappropriate. In this case, partners will depend on each other's flexibility or interdependence. The former, flexibility, provides a general frame of reference, order, and standards against which to guide and assess appropriate behavior in dynamic and ambiguous situations, thus motivating the value-oriented performance goals shared between partners. It is based on social sacrifices, which can potentially minimize any opportunistic behaviors. The later, interdependence, means that each firm possesses a high level of dependence in an dynamic channel relationship. When interdependence is high in magnitude and symmetric, each firm enjoys a high level of power and the bonds between the firms should be reasonably strong. Strong shared power is likely to promote commitment because of the common interests, attention, and support found in such channel relationships. This study deals with environmental dynamism in high-tech industry. Firms in the high-tech industry regard it as a key success factor to successfully cope with environmental changes. However, due to the lack of studies dealing with environmental dynamism and supply chain commitment in the high-tech industry, it is very difficult to find effective strategies to cope with them. This paper presents the results of an empirical study on the relationship between environmental dynamism and supply chain commitment in the high-tech industry. We examined the effects of consumer, competitor, and technological dynamism on supply chain commitment. Additionally, we examined the moderating effects of flexibility and dependence of supply chains. This study was confined to the type of high-tech industry which has the characteristics of rapid technology change and short product lifecycle. Flexibility among the firms of this industry, having the characteristic of hard and fast growth, is more important here than among any other industry. Thus, a variety of environmental dynamism can affect a supply chain relationship. The industries targeted industries were electronic parts, metal product, computer, electric machine, automobile, and medical precision manufacturing industries. Data was collected as follows. During the survey, the researchers managed to obtain the list of parts suppliers of 2 companies, N and L, with an international competitiveness in the mobile phone manufacturing industry; and of the suppliers in a business relationship with S company, a semiconductor manufacturing company. They were asked to respond to the survey via telephone and e-mail. During the two month period of February-April 2006, we were able to collect data from 44 companies. The respondents were restricted to direct dealing authorities and subcontractor company (the supplier) staff with at least three months of dealing experience with a manufacture (an industrial material buyer). The measurement validation procedures included scale reliability; discriminant and convergent validity were used to validate measures. Also, the reliability measurements traditionally employed, such as the Cronbach's alpha, were used. All the reliabilities were greater than.70. A series of exploratory factor analyses was conducted. We conducted confirmatory factor analyses to assess the validity of our measurements. A series of chi-square difference tests were conducted so that the discriminant validity could be ensured. For each pair, we estimated two models-an unconstrained model and a constrained model-and compared the two model fits. All these tests supported discriminant validity. Also, all items loaded significantly on their respective constructs, providing support for convergent validity. We then examined composite reliability and average variance extracted (AVE). The composite reliability of each construct was greater than.70. The AVE of each construct was greater than.50. According to the multiple regression analysis, customer dynamism had a negative effect and competitor dynamism had a positive effect on a supplier's commitment. In addition, flexibility and dependence had significant moderating effects on customer and competitor dynamism. On the other hand, all hypotheses about technological dynamism had no significant effects on commitment. In other words, technological dynamism had no direct effect on supplier's commitment and was not moderated by the flexibility and dependence of the supply chain. This study makes its contribution in the point of view that this is a rare study on environmental dynamism and supply chain commitment in the field of high-tech industry. Especially, this study verified the effects of three sectors of environmental dynamism on supplier's commitment. Also, it empirically tested how the effects were moderated by flexibility and dependence. The results showed that flexibility and interdependence had a role to strengthen supplier's commitment under environmental dynamism in high-tech industry. Thus relationship managers in high-tech industry should make supply chain relationship flexible and interdependent. The limitations of the study are as follows; First, about the research setting, the study was conducted with high-tech industry, in which the direction of the change in the power balance of supply chain dyads is usually determined by manufacturers. So we have a difficulty with generalization. We need to control the power structure between partners in a future study. Secondly, about flexibility, we treated it throughout the paper as positive, but it can also be negative, i.e. violating an agreement or moving, but in the wrong direction, etc. Therefore we need to investigate the multi-dimensionality of flexibility in future research.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.51-69
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• 2020

Now, it is a stylized fact that a small number of technology firms such as Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and a few others have become larger and dominant players in an industry. Coupled with the rise of these leading firms, we have also observed that a large number of young firms have become an acquisition target in their early IPO stages. This indeed results in a sharp decline in the number of new entries in public exchanges although a series of policy reforms have been promulgated to foster competition through an increase in new entries. Given the observed industry trend in recent decades, a number of studies have reported increased concentration in most developed countries. However, it is less understood as to what caused an increase in industry concentration. In this paper, we uncover the mechanisms by which industries have become concentrated over the last decades by tracing the changes in industry concentration associated with a firm's status change in its early IPO stages. To this end, we put emphasis on the case in which firms are acquired shortly after they went public. Especially, with the transition to digital-based economies, it is imperative for incumbent firms to adapt and keep pace with new ICT and related intelligent systems. For instance, after the acquisition of a young firm equipped with AI-based solutions, an incumbent firm may better respond to a change in customer taste and preference by integrating acquired AI solutions and analytics skills into multiple business processes. Accordingly, it is not unusual for young ICT firms become an attractive acquisition target. To examine the role of M&As involved with young firms in reshaping the level of industry concentration, we identify a firm's status in early post-IPO stages over the sample periods spanning from 1990 to 2016 as follows: i) being delisted, ii) being standalone firms and iii) being acquired. According to our analysis, firms that have conducted IPO since 2000s have been acquired by incumbent firms at a relatively quicker time than those that did IPO in previous generations. We also show a greater acquisition rate for IPO firms in the ICT sector compared with their counterparts in other sectors. Our results based on multinomial logit models suggest that a large number of IPO firms have been acquired in their early post-IPO lives despite their financial soundness. Specifically, we show that IPO firms are likely to be acquired rather than be delisted due to financial distress in early IPO stages when they are more profitable, more mature or less leveraged. For those IPO firms with venture capital backup have also become an acquisition target more frequently. As a larger number of firms are acquired shortly after their IPO, our results show increased concentration. While providing limited evidence on the impact of large incumbent firms in explaining the change in industry concentration, our results show that the large firms' effect on industry concentration are pronounced in the ICT sector. This result possibly captures the current trend that a few tech giants such as Alphabet, Apple and Facebook continue to increase their market share. In addition, compared with the acquisitions of non-ICT firms, the concentration impact of IPO firms in early stages becomes larger when ICT firms are acquired as a target. Our study makes new contributions. To our best knowledge, this is one of a few studies that link a firm's post-IPO status to associated changes in industry concentration. Although some studies have addressed concentration issues, their primary focus was on market power or proprietary software. Contrast to earlier studies, we are able to uncover the mechanism by which industries have become concentrated by placing emphasis on M&As involving young IPO firms. Interestingly, the concentration impact of IPO firm acquisitions are magnified when a large incumbent firms are involved as an acquirer. This leads us to infer the underlying reasons as to why industries have become more concentrated with a favor of large firms in recent decades. Overall, our study sheds new light on the literature by providing a plausible explanation as to why industries have become concentrated.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.67-83
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• 2018

The Korean film industry with significant increase every year exceeded the number of cumulative audiences of 200 million people in 2013 finally. However, starting from 2015 the Korean film industry entered a period of low growth and experienced a negative growth after all in 2016. To overcome such difficulty, stakeholders like production company, distribution company, multiplex have attempted to maximize the market returns using strategies of predicting change of market and of responding to such market change immediately. Since a film is classified as one of experiential products, it is not easy to predict a box office record and the initial number of audiences before the film is released. And also, the number of audiences fluctuates with a variety of factors after the film is released. So, the production company and distribution company try to be guaranteed the number of screens at the opining time of a newly released by multiplex chains. However, the multiplex chains tend to open the screening schedule during only a week and then determine the number of screening of the forthcoming week based on the box office record and the evaluation of audiences. Many previous researches have conducted to deal with the prediction of box office records of films. In the early stage, the researches attempted to identify factors affecting the box office record. And nowadays, many studies have tried to apply various analytic techniques to the factors identified previously in order to improve the accuracy of prediction and to explain the effect of each factor instead of identifying new factors affecting the box office record. However, most of previous researches have limitations in that they used the total number of audiences from the opening to the end as a target variable, and this makes it difficult to predict and respond to the demand of market which changes dynamically. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to predict the weekly number of audiences of a newly released film so that the stakeholder can flexibly and elastically respond to the change of the number of audiences in the film. To that end, we considered the factors used in the previous studies affecting box office and developed new factors not used in previous studies such as the order of opening of movies, dynamics of sales. Along with the comprehensive factors, we used the machine learning method such as Random Forest, Multi Layer Perception, Support Vector Machine, and Naive Bays, to predict the number of cumulative visitors from the first week after a film release to the third week. At the point of the first and the second week, we predicted the cumulative number of visitors of the forthcoming week for a released film. And at the point of the third week, we predict the total number of visitors of the film. In addition, we predicted the total number of cumulative visitors also at the point of the both first week and second week using the same factors. As a result, we found the accuracy of predicting the number of visitors at the forthcoming week was higher than that of predicting the total number of them in all of three weeks, and also the accuracy of the Random Forest was the highest among the machine learning methods we used. This study has implications in that this study 1) considered various factors comprehensively which affect the box office record and merely addressed by other previous researches such as the weekly rating of audiences after release, the weekly rank of the film after release, and the weekly sales share after release, and 2) tried to predict and respond to the demand of market which changes dynamically by suggesting models which predicts the weekly number of audiences of newly released films so that the stakeholders can flexibly and elastically respond to the change of the number of audiences in the film.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.83-98
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• 2012

In a market where new and used cars are competing with each other, we would run the risk of obtaining biased estimates of cross elasticity between them if we focus on only new cars or on only used cars. Unfortunately, most of previous studies on the automobile industry have focused on only new car models without taking into account the effect of used cars' pricing policy on new cars' market shares and vice versa, resulting in inadequate prediction of reactive pricing in response to competitors' rebate or price discount. However, there are some exceptions. Purohit (1992) and Sullivan (1990) looked into both new and used car markets at the same time to examine the effect of new car model launching on the used car prices. But their studies have some limitations in that they employed the average used car prices reported in NADA Used Car Guide instead of actual transaction prices. Some of the conflicting results may be due to this problem in the data. Park (1998) recognized this problem and used the actual prices in his study. His work is notable in that he investigated the qualitative effect of new car model launching on the pricing policy of the used car in terms of reinforcement of brand equity. The current work also used the actual price like Park (1998) but the quantitative aspect of competitive price promotion between new and used cars of the same model was explored. In this study, I develop a model that assumes that the cross elasticity between new and used cars of the same model is higher than those amongst new cars and used cars of the different model. Specifically, I apply the nested logit model that assumes the car model choice at the first stage and the choice between new and used cars at the second stage. This proposed model is compared to the IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) model that assumes that there is no decision hierarchy but that new and used cars of the different model are all substitutable at the first stage. The data for this study are drawn from Power Information Network (PIN), an affiliate of J.D. Power and Associates. PIN collects sales transaction data from a sample of dealerships in the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. These are retail transactions, i.e., sales or leases to final consumers, excluding fleet sales and including both new car and used car sales. Each observation in the PIN database contains the transaction date, the manufacturer, model year, make, model, trim and other car information, the transaction price, consumer rebates, the interest rate, term, amount financed (when the vehicle is financed or leased), etc. I used data for the compact cars sold during the period January 2009- June 2009. The new and used cars of the top nine selling models are included in the study: Mazda 3, Honda Civic, Chevrolet Cobalt, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Elantra, Ford Focus, Volkswagen Jetta, Nissan Sentra, and Kia Spectra. These models in the study accounted for 87% of category unit sales. Empirical application of the nested logit model showed that the proposed model outperformed the IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) model in both calibration and holdout samples. The other comparison model that assumes choice between new and used cars at the first stage and car model choice at the second stage turned out to be mis-specfied since the dissimilarity parameter (i.e., inclusive or categroy value parameter) was estimated to be greater than 1. Post hoc analysis based on estimated parameters was conducted employing the modified Lanczo's iterative method. This method is intuitively appealing. For example, suppose a new car offers a certain amount of rebate and gains market share at first. In response to this rebate, a used car of the same model keeps decreasing price until it regains the lost market share to maintain the status quo. The new car settle down to a lowered market share due to the used car's reaction. The method enables us to find the amount of price discount to main the status quo and equilibrium market shares of the new and used cars. In the first simulation, I used Jetta as a focal brand to see how its new and used cars set prices, rebates or APR interactively assuming that reactive cars respond to price promotion to maintain the status quo. The simulation results showed that the IIA model underestimates cross elasticities, resulting in suggesting less aggressive used car price discount in response to new cars' rebate than the proposed nested logit model. In the second simulation, I used Elantra to reconfirm the result for Jetta and came to the same conclusion. In the third simulation, I had Corolla offer $1,000 rebate to see what could be the best response for Elantra's new and used cars. Interestingly, Elantra's used car could maintain the status quo by offering lower price discount ($160) than the new car ($205). In the future research, we might want to explore the plausibility of the alternative nested logit model. For example, the NUB model that assumes choice between new and used cars at the first stage and brand choice at the second stage could be a possibility even though it was rejected in the current study because of mis-specification (A dissimilarity parameter turned out to be higher than 1). The NUB model may have been rejected due to true mis-specification or data structure transmitted from a typical car dealership. In a typical car dealership, both new and used cars of the same model are displayed. Because of this fact, the BNU model that assumes brand choice at the first stage and choice between new and used cars at the second stage may have been favored in the current study since customers first choose a dealership (brand) then choose between new and used cars given this market environment. However, suppose there are dealerships that carry both new and used cars of various models, then the NUB model might fit the data as well as the BNU model. Which model is a better description of the data is an empirical question. In addition, it would be interesting to test a probabilistic mixture model of the BNU and NUB on a new data set.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.143-163
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• 2016

The demographics of Internet users are the most basic and important sources for target marketing or personalized advertisements on the digital marketing channels which include email, mobile, and social media. However, it gradually has become difficult to collect the demographics of Internet users because their activities are anonymous in many cases. Although the marketing department is able to get the demographics using online or offline surveys, these approaches are very expensive, long processes, and likely to include false statements. Clickstream data is the recording an Internet user leaves behind while visiting websites. As the user clicks anywhere in the webpage, the activity is logged in semi-structured website log files. Such data allows us to see what pages users visited, how long they stayed there, how often they visited, when they usually visited, which site they prefer, what keywords they used to find the site, whether they purchased any, and so forth. For such a reason, some researchers tried to guess the demographics of Internet users by using their clickstream data. They derived various independent variables likely to be correlated to the demographics. The variables include search keyword, frequency and intensity for time, day and month, variety of websites visited, text information for web pages visited, etc. The demographic attributes to predict are also diverse according to the paper, and cover gender, age, job, location, income, education, marital status, presence of children. A variety of data mining methods, such as LSA, SVM, decision tree, neural network, logistic regression, and k-nearest neighbors, were used for prediction model building. However, this research has not yet identified which data mining method is appropriate to predict each demographic variable. Moreover, it is required to review independent variables studied so far and combine them as needed, and evaluate them for building the best prediction model. The objective of this study is to choose clickstream attributes mostly likely to be correlated to the demographics from the results of previous research, and then to identify which data mining method is fitting to predict each demographic attribute. Among the demographic attributes, this paper focus on predicting gender, age, marital status, residence, and job. And from the results of previous research, 64 clickstream attributes are applied to predict the demographic attributes. The overall process of predictive model building is compose of 4 steps. In the first step, we create user profiles which include 64 clickstream attributes and 5 demographic attributes. The second step performs the dimension reduction of clickstream variables to solve the curse of dimensionality and overfitting problem. We utilize three approaches which are based on decision tree, PCA, and cluster analysis. We build alternative predictive models for each demographic variable in the third step. SVM, neural network, and logistic regression are used for modeling. The last step evaluates the alternative models in view of model accuracy and selects the best model. For the experiments, we used clickstream data which represents 5 demographics and 16,962,705 online activities for 5,000 Internet users. IBM SPSS Modeler 17.0 was used for our prediction process, and the 5-fold cross validation was conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. As the experimental results, we can verify that there are a specific data mining method well-suited for each demographic variable. For example, age prediction is best performed when using the decision tree based dimension reduction and neural network whereas the prediction of gender and marital status is the most accurate by applying SVM without dimension reduction. We conclude that the online behaviors of the Internet users, captured from the clickstream data analysis, could be well used to predict their demographics, thereby being utilized to the digital marketing.