• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.271-276
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• 2005

A totally 178 housewives in Gyeongnam were surveyed on consumer's purchase behavior and perception of branded pork. The degree of consumers' perception and reliance on the branded pork was still low. Consumers' consideration quality factors when buying pent is higher in order of safety/hygiene>taste/tenderness>meat color, In taste, consumer preferred Korean native pig meat when compared to the common meat. But the consumers have a notion that the price of Korean native pig meat was too expensive. The consumer preferred consumer group to government agency as a official approval organ for pork quality assurance. The consumers had different behavior in information channel, purchase frequency and place depending on age, income. In the development of branded pork, further studied are required on consumers' purchase behavior, perception, preference choice and decision-making process of branded pork.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.111-125
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• 2023

Due to the car's central role in modern life, the industry has become more fiercely competitive, with each manufacturer doing everything it can to attract buyers with features like plush interiors, comprehensive warranties, and helpful customer service departments. Customers may not have the luxury of buying a new car, so they will have to buy a used car. Nevertheless, in most cases, the customer (car driver) may be deceived about the vehicle information and history and thus will be confused in making his/her decision to purchase. In addition, after all attempts to obtain vehicle information (plate number, model, year of manufacture, number of maintenance times, accidents, etc.), the customer's many attempts may fail. In general, the government records and verifies the information of all cars, even those that pass through their borders. However, there might still be some trouble in obtaining this information. From this standpoint, we will design a website that makes it easier for car drivers, car companies and governments to carry out all the above-mentioned processes. It will also allow users, whether a driver or a car company, to inquire about all vehicle information through detailed and integrated reports on its condition since its entry into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until the present time, in addition to information supported by numbers and statistics to ensure the integrity and reliability of the information. This platform will save the trouble of searching for car information for drivers and car companies. It will also help governments keep track of the information of all cars entering and leaving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which will contribute to facilitating the process of viewing the history of any car that has previously entered the Kingdom's borders.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.245-276
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• 2008

Brand equity is one of the most important concepts in business practice as well as in academic research. Successful brands can allow marketers to gain competitive advantage (Lassar et al.,1995), including the opportunity for successful extensions, resilience against competitors' promotional pressures, and the ability to create barriers to competitive entry (Farquhar, 1989). Branding plays a special role in service firms because strong brands increase trust in intangible products (Berry, 2000), enabling customers to better visualize and understand them. They reduce customers' perceived monetary, social, and safety risks in buying services, which are obstacles to evaluating a service correctly before purchase. Also, a high level of brand equity increases consumer satisfaction, repurchasing intent, and degree of loyalty. Brand equity can be considered as a mixture that includes both financial assets and relationships. Actually, brand equity can be viewed as the value added to the product (Keller, 1993), or the perceived value of the product in consumers' minds. Mahajan et al. (1990) claim that customer-based brand equity can be measured by the level of consumers' perceptions. Several researchers discuss brand equity based on two dimensions: consumer perception and consumer behavior. Aaker (1991) suggests measuring brand equity through price premium, loyalty, perceived quality, and brand associations. Viewing brand equity as the consumer's behavior toward a brand, Keller (1993) proposes similar dimensions: brand awareness and brand knowledge. Thus, past studies tend to identify brand equity as a multidimensional construct consisted of brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand knowledge, customer satisfaction, perceived equity, brand associations, and other proprietary assets (Aaker, 1991, 1996; Blackston, 1995; Cobb-Walgren et al., 1995; Na, 1995). Other studies tend to regard brand equity and other brand assets, such as brand knowledge, brand awareness, brand image, brand loyalty, perceived quality, and so on, as independent but related constructs (Keller, 1993; Kirmani and Zeithaml, 1993). Walters(1978) defined information search as, "A psychological or physical action a consumer takes in order to acquire information about a product or store." But, each consumer has different methods for informationsearch. There are two methods of information search, internal and external search. Internal search is, "Search of information already saved in the memory of the individual consumer"(Engel, Blackwell, 1982) which is, "memory of a previous purchase experience or information from a previous search."(Beales, Mazis, Salop, and Staelin, 1981). External search is "A completely voluntary decision made in order to obtain new information"(Engel & Blackwell, 1982) which is, "Actions of a consumer to acquire necessary information by such methods as intentionally exposing oneself to advertisements, taking to friends or family or visiting a store."(Beales, Mazis, Salop, and Staelin, 1981). There are many sources for consumers' information search including advertisement sources such as the internet, radio, television, newspapers and magazines, information supplied by businesses such as sales people, packaging and in-store information, consumer sources such as family, friends and colleagues, and mass media sources such as consumer protection agencies, government agencies and mass media sources. Understanding consumers' purchasing behavior is a key factor of a firm to attract and retain customers and improving the firm's prospects for survival and growth, and enhancing shareholder's value. Therefore, marketers should understand consumer as individual and market segment. One theory of consumer behavior supports the belief that individuals are rational. Individuals think and move through stages when making a purchase decision. This means that rational thinkers have led to the identification of a consumer buying decision process. This decision process with its different levels of involvement and influencing factors has been widely accepted and is fundamental to the understanding purchase intention represent to what consumers think they will buy. Brand equity is not only companies but also very important asset more than product itself. This paper studies brand equity model and influencing factors including information process such as information searching and information resources in the fashion market in Asia and Europe. Information searching and information resources are influencing brand knowledge that influences consumers purchase decision. Nine research hypotheses are drawn to test the relationships among antecedents of brand equity and purchase intention and relationships among brand knowledge, brand value, brand attitude, and brand loyalty. H1. Information searching influences brand knowledge positively. H2. Information sources influence brand knowledge positively. H3. Brand knowledge influences brand attitude. H4. Brand knowledge influences brand value. H5. Brand attitude influences brand loyalty. H6. Brand attitude influences brand value. H7. Brand loyalty influences purchase intention. H8. Brand value influence purchase intention. H9. There will be the same research model in Asia and Europe. We performed structural equation model analysis in order to test hypotheses suggested in this study. The model fitting index of the research model in Asia was $X^2$=195.19(p=0.0), NFI=0.90, NNFI=0.87, CFI=0.90, GFI=0.90, RMR=0.083, AGFI=0.85, which means the model fitting of the model is good enough. In Europe, it was $X^2$=133.25(p=0.0), NFI=0.81, NNFI=0.85, CFI=0.89, GFI=0.90, RMR=0.073, AGFI=0.85, which means the model fitting of the model is good enough. From the test results, hypotheses were accepted. All of these hypotheses except one are supported. In Europe, information search is not an antecedent of brand knowledge. This means that sales of global fashion brands like jeans in Europe are not expanding as rapidly as in Asian markets such as China, Japan, and South Korea. Young consumers in European countries are not more brand and fashion conscious than their counter partners in Asia. The results have theoretical, practical meaning and contributions. In the fashion jeans industry, relatively few studies examining the viability of cross-national brand equity has been studied. This study provides insight on building global brand equity and suggests information process elements like information search and information resources are working differently in Asia and Europe for fashion jean market.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.830-860
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• 2022

[Introduction] Nowadays, many companies are shifting their businesses online due to the growing trend among customers to buy and shop online, as people prefer online purchasing products. [Problem] Users share a vast amount of information about products, making it difficult and challenging for the end-users to make certain decisions. [Motivation] Therefore, we need a mechanism to automatically analyze end-user opinions, thoughts, or feelings in the social media platform about the products that might be useful for the customers to make or change their decisions about buying or purchasing specific products. [Proposed Solution] For this purpose, we proposed an automated SentiDecpective approach, which classifies end-user reviews into negative, positive, and neutral sentiments and identifies deceptive crowd-users rating information in the social media platform to help the user in decision-making. [Methodology] For this purpose, we first collected 11781 end-users comments from the Amazon store and Flipkart web application covering distant products, such as watches, mobile, shoes, clothes, and perfumes. Next, we develop a coding guideline used as a base for the comments annotation process. We then applied the content analysis approach and existing VADER library to annotate the end-user comments in the data set with the identified codes, which results in a labelled data set used as an input to the machine learning classifiers. Finally, we applied the sentiment analysis approach to identify the end-users opinions and overcome the deceptive rating information in the social media platforms by first preprocessing the input data to remove the irrelevant (stop words, special characters, etc.) data from the dataset, employing two standard resampling approaches to balance the data set, i-e, oversampling, and under-sampling, extract different features (TF-IDF and BOW) from the textual data in the data set and then train & test the machine learning algorithms by applying a standard cross-validation approach (KFold and Shuffle Split). [Results/Outcomes] Furthermore, to support our research study, we developed an automated tool that automatically analyzes each customer feedback and displays the collective sentiments of customers about a specific product with the help of a graph, which helps customers to make certain decisions. In a nutshell, our proposed sentiments approach produces good results when identifying the customer sentiments from the online user feedbacks, i-e, obtained an average 94.01% precision, 93.69% recall, and 93.81% F-measure value for classifying positive sentiments.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.125-137
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• 2011

Product reviews in online shopping sites can serve as a useful guideline to buying decisions of customers. However, due to the massive amount of such reviews, it is almost impossible for users to read all the product reviews. For this reason, e-commerce sites provide users with useful reviews or statistics of ratings on products that are manually chosen or calculated. Opinion mining or sentiment analysis is a study on automating above process that involves firstly analyzing users' reviews on a product to tell if a review contains positive or negative feedback, and secondly, providing a summarized report of users' opinions. Previous researches focus on either providing polarity of a user's opinion or summarizing user's opinion on a feature of a product that result in relatively low usage of information that a user review contains. Actual user reviews contains not only mere assessment of a product, but also dissatisfaction and flaws of a product that a user experiences. There are increasing needs for effective analysis on such criteria to help users on their decision-making process. This paper proposes a model that stores various types of user reviews in a data warehouse, and analyzes integrated reviews dynamically. Also, we analyze reviews of an online application shopping site with the proposed model.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.81-93
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• 2015

Purpose - "Showrooming" refers to the phenomenon where a shopper visits a store to see and compare products but makes the purchase online at a lower price. Surveys on showrooming activities at home and abroad indicate that a significant number of consumers pursue showrooming activities. The advent of "showroomers," who engage in buying activities, hovering both on and offline, while selectively choosing sales channels to suit their needs, is powerful enough to erode the borders between channels and bring about seismic changes in the distribution industry. However, surprisingly, there has been no in-depth discussion on showrooming. This study seeks to theoretically investigate what impact personal characteristics have on showrooming preferences and attitudes in a multi-channel environment. Specifically, assumptions have been made that price perception, perceived performance risk, and trust in online shopping not only have a direct impact on showrooming attitudes but also indirectly affect it through the means of contact motivation. Research design, data, and methodology - To test the hypotheses, this study conducted a survey of male and female shoppers, ages 20 through 40s, who live in metropolitan areas, and have actively showroomed fashion items in the last six months. A clothing item usually purchased after a careful decision-making process was chosen as the target product of the study. The survey was conducted between October and November 2014, using a professional survey service provider. A total of 200 surveys were collected, of which 198 were used for analysis. Conceptual model Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Amos 18.0 were employed for data analysis and model verification. In addition, following the confirmatory factor analysis and measurement model analysis, the theoretical model that corresponds to the research model was analyzed. Results - Analysis results show that price perception, perceived performance risk, and trust in online shopping have a statistically significant and positive (+) impact on showrooming attitudes. In addition, in terms of the indirect influence of price perception and perceived performance risk on showrooming attitudes through means of contact motivation, price perception had a statistically significant and positive impact on means of contact motivation, whereas perceived performance risk did not have a statistically significant impact on it, with the relevant hypothesis rejected. Conclusions - These analysis results imply that the ultimate goal of consumers is to maximize their shopping benefits by selectively and strategically taking advantage of different channels in a complementary manner. This study presents many implications for distributors to encourage a deep understanding of showrooming consumers who have complicated consumption behaviors and to build channel integration strategies. This study has limitations in theoretical and practical implications. Therefore, subsequent studies need to focus on verifying that showrooming activities are based on reasonable and planned decisions by applying the theory of reasoned or planned behavior. In addition, the scope of the study should expand to include web showrooming, where consumers conduct product research online and purchase offline.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.91-100
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• 2015

Recently many companies began to feel the pressures of cost savings due to the global recession, so they have been interested in the Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is one of using method of IT resources through the network. Users can borrow softwares or hardwares instead of buying them. Many people expect remarkable growth in Cloud Computing industry because of it's effectiveness. But Cloud Computing industry is still at an early stage. Especially, people who in the public sector hesitate to adopt Cloud Computing Services due to security issues and their conservative views. Also, they just have limited understanding, so we need to investigate what they really know and understand. Researches about the Cloud Computing generally focus on technical issues, so we can hardly find researches reference for decision making in considering the services. The study aims to investigate diverse factors for agencies' adoption decisions, such as benefits, costs, and risk in developing the most ideal type of cloud computing service for them, and performs priority analyses by applying ANP (Analytic Network Process). The results identify that features pertaining to the risk properties were considered the most significant factors. According to this research, the usage of private cloud computing services may prove to be appropriate for public environment in Korea. The study will hopefully provide the guideline to many governmental agencies and service providers, and assist the related authorities with cloud computing policy in coming up with the relevant regulations.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.77-86
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• 2016

Before urban railway vehicles reach their design life-span, operating agencies should determine when to buy new vehicles. Previous LCC (Life Cycle Cost) studies were limited because they independently focused on existing vehicles based on costs that directly impacted only the operating agency without considering effects such as social costs and the reduction of maintenance costs. Thus, it is difficult to systematically determine when to buy new vehicles. This study investigated the operating and maintenance related costs, especially from additional expenses and social costs due to unexpected vehicle failures and safety accidents, and did an economic analysis of scenarios with different discount rates. Considering that the public is very concerned about safety after the Sewol ferry accident, additional costs, which include social costs, should be included in the analysis. This study shows that the economic priority of scenarios may change depending on whether those costs are included and on the discount rate. The results of this study can help in the decision-making process for the planning and buying of new trains.

• 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).