• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.111-137
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• 2010

The basic purpose of this study is to investigate perceived quality and service personal value affecting the result of long-term relationship between service buyers and suppliers. This research presented a constructive model(perceived quality affecting the service personal value and the moderate effect of NFC) in the on off line and then propose the research model base on prior researches and studies about relationships among components of service. Data were gathered from respondents who visit at the education service market. For this study, Data were analyzed by AMOS 7.0. We integrate the literature on services marketing with researches on personal values and perceived quality. The SERPVAL scale presented here allows for the creation of a common ground for assessing service personal values, giving a clear understanding of the key value dimensions behind service choice and usage. It will lead to a focus of future research in services marketing, extending knowledge in the field and stimulating further empirical research on service personal values. At the managerial level, as a tool the SERPVAL scale should allow practitioners to evaluate and improve the value of a service, and consequently, to define strategies and actions to address services for customers based on their fundamental personal values. Through qualitative and empirical research, we find that the service quality construct conforms to the structure of a second-order factor model that ties service quality perceptions to distinct and actionable dimensions: outcome, interaction, and environmental quality. In turn, each has two subdimensions that define the basis of service quality perceptions. The authors further suggest that for each of these subdimensions to contribute to improved service quality perceptions, the quality received by consumers must be perceived to be reliable, responsive, and empathetic. Although the service personal value may be found in researches that explore individual values and their consequences for consumer behavior, there is no established operationalization of a SERPVAL scale. The inexistence of an established scale, duly adapted in order to understand and analyze personal values behind services usage, exposes the need of a measurement scale with such a purpose. This need has to be rooted, however, in a conceptualization of the construct being scaled. Service personal values can be defined as a customer's overall assessment of the use of a service based on the perception of what is achieved in terms of his own personal values. As consumer behaviors serve to show an individual's values, the use of a service can also be a way to fulfill and demonstrate consumers'personal values. In this sense, a service can provide more to the customer than its concrete and abstract attributes at both the attribute and the quality levels, and more than its functional consequences at the value level. Both values and services literatures agree, that personal value is the highest-level concept, followed by instrumental values, attitudes and finally by product attributes. Purchasing behaviors are agreed to be the end result of these concepts' interaction, with personal values taking a major role in the final decision process. From both consumers' and practitioners' perspectives, values are extremely relevant, as they are desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people's lives. While building on previous research, we propose to assess service personal values through three broad groups of individual dimensions; at the self-oriented level, we use (1) service value to peaceful life (SVPL) and, at the social-oriented level, we use (2) service value to social recognition (SVSR), and (3) service value to social integration (SVSI). Service value to peaceful life is our first dimension. This dimension emerged as a combination of values coming from the RVS scale, a scale built specifically to assess general individual values. If a service promotes a pleasurable life, brings or improves tranquility, safety and harmony, then its user recognizes the value of this service. Generally, this service can improve the user's pleasure of life, since it protects or defends the consumer from threats to life or pressures on it. While building upon both the LOV scale, a scale built specifically to assess consumer values, and the RVS scale for individual values, we develop the other two dimensions: SVSR and SVSI. The roles of social recognition and social integration to improve service personal value have been seriously neglected. Social recognition derives its outcome utility from its predictive utility. When applying this underlying belief to our second dimension, SVSR, we assume that people use a service while taking into consideration the content of what is delivered. Individuals consider whether the service aids in gaining respect from others, social recognition and status, as well as whether it allows achieving a more fulfilled and stimulating life, which might then be revealed to others. People also tend to engage in behavior that receives social recognition and to avoid behavior that leads to social disapproval, and this contributes to an individual's social integration. This leads us to the third dimension, SVSI, which is based on the fact that if the consumer perceives that a service strengthens friendships, provides the possibility of becoming more integrated in the group, or promotes better relationships at the social, professional or family levels, then the service will contribute to social integration, and naturally the individual will recognize personal value in the service. Most of the research in business values deals with individual values. However, to our knowledge, no study has dealt with assessing overall personal values as well as their dimensions in a service context. Our final results show that the scales adapted from the Schwartz list were excluded. A possible explanation is that although Schwartz builds on Rokeach work in order to explore individual values, its dimensions might be especially focused on analyzing societal values. As we are looking for individual dimensions, this might explain why the values inspired by the Schwartz list were excluded from the model. The hierarchical structure of the final scale presented in this paper also presents theoretical implications. Although we cannot claim to definitively capture the dimensions of service personal values, we believe that we come close to capturing these overall evaluations because the second-order factor extracts the underlying commonality among dimensions. In addition to obtaining respondents' evaluations of the dimensions, the second-order factor model captures the common variance among these dimensions, reflecting the respondents' overall assessment of service personal values. Towards this fact, we expect that the service personal values conceptualization and measurement scale presented here contributes to both business values literature and the service marketing field, allowing for the delineation of strategies for adding value to services. This new scale also presents managerial implications. The SERPVAL dimensions give some guidance on how to better pursue a highly service-oriented business strategy. Indeed, the SERPVAL scale can be used for benchmarking purposes, as this scale can be used to identify whether or not a firms' marketing strategies are consistent with consumers' expectations. Managerial assessment of the personal values of a service might be extremely important because it allows managers to better understand what customers want or value. Thus, this scale allows us to identify what services are really valuable to the final consumer; providing knowledge for making choices regarding which services to include. Traditional approaches have focused their attention on service attributes (as quality) and service consequences(as service value), but personal values may be an important set of variables to be considered in understanding what attracts consumers to a certain service. By using the SERPVAL scale to assess the personal values associated with a services usage, managers may better understand the reasons behind services' usage, so that they may handle them more efficiently. While testing nomological validity, our empirical findings demonstrate that the three SERPVAL dimensions are positively and significantly associated with satisfaction. Additionally, while service value to social integration is related only with loyalty, service value to peaceful life is associated with both loyalty and repurchase intent. It is also interesting and surprising that service value to social recognition appears not to be significantly linked with loyalty and repurchase intent. A possible explanation is that no mobile service provider has yet emerged in the market as a luxury provider. All of the Portuguese providers are still trying to capture market share by means of low-end pricing. This research has implications for consumers as well. As more companies seek to build relationships with their customers, consumers are easily able to examine whether these relationships provide real value or not to their own lives. The selection of a strategy for a particular service depends on its customers' personal values. Being highly customer-oriented means having a strong commitment to customers, trying to create customer value and understanding customer needs. Enhancing service distinctiveness in order to provide a peaceful life, increase social recognition and gain a better social integration are all possible strategies that companies may pursue, but the one to pursue depends on the outstanding personal values held by the service customers. Data were gathered from 284 respondents in the korean discount store and online shopping mall market. This research proposed 3 hypotheses on 6 latent variables and tested through structural equation modeling. 6 alternative measurements were compared through statistical significance test of the 6 paths of research model and the overall fitting level of structural equation model. and the result was successful. and Perceived quality more positively influences service personal value when NFC is high than when no NFC is low in the off-line market. The results of the study indicate that service quality is properly modeled as an antecedent of service personal value. We consider the research and managerial implications of the study and its limitations. In sum, by knowing the dimensions a consumer takes into account when choosing a service, a better understanding of purchasing behaviors may be realized, guiding managers toward customers expectations. By defining strategies and actions that address potential problems with the service personal values, managers might ultimately influence their firm's performance. we expect to contribute to both business values and service marketing literatures through the development of the service personal value. At a time when marketing researchers are challenged to provide research with practical implications, it is also believed that this framework may be used by managers to pursue service-oriented business strategies while taking into consideration what customers value.

• Journal of Science of Art and Design
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• v.11
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• pp.221-249
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• 2007

Today, photography is facing to the crisis of identity and dilemma of ontology from the digital imaging process in the new technology form. It is very important points to say rethinking of the traditional photographic medium, that has changed the way we view the world and ourselves is perhaps an understatement and that photography has transformed our essential understanding of reality. Now, no longer are photographic images regarded as the true automatic recording, innocent evidence and the mirror to the reality. Rather, photography constructs the world for our entertainment, helping to create the comforting illusions by which we live. The recognition that photographs are not constructions and reflections of reality, is the basis for the actual presence within the contemporary photographic world. It is shock. This thesis's aim is to look for the problems of photographic identity and ontological crisis that is controlling and regulating digital photographic imagery, allowing the reproduction of the electronic simulations era. Photography loses its special aesthetic status and becomes no more true information and, exclusively evidence by traditional film and paper that appeared both as a technological accuracy and as a medium-specific aesthetic. The result, photography is facing two crises, one is the photographic ontology(the introduction of computerized digital images) and the other is photographic epistemology(having to do broader changes in ethics, knowledge and culture). Taken together, these crises apparently threaten us with the death of photography, with the 'end' of photography and the culture it sustains. The thesis's meaning is to look into the dilemma of photography's ontology and epistemology, especially, automatical index and digital codes from its origin, meaning, and identity as the technological medium. Thus, in particular, thesis focuses on the analog imagery presence, from the nature in the material world, and the digital imagery presence from the cultural situations in our society. And also thesis's aim is to examine the main issues of the history of photography has been concentrated on the ontological arguments since the discovery of photography in 1839. Photography has never been only one static technology form. Rather, its nearly two centuries of technological development have been marked by numerous, competing of technological innovation and self revolution from the dual aspects. This thesis examines recent account of photography by the analysis of the medium's concept, meaning, identity between film base image and digital base image from the aspects of photographic ontology and epistemology. Thus, the structure of thesis is fairy straightforward to examine what appear to be two opposing view of photographic conditions and ontological situations. Thesis' view contrasts that figure out the value of photography according to its fundamental characteristic as a medium. Also, it seeks a possible solution to the dilemma of photographic ontology through the medium's origin from the early years of the nineteenth century to the raising questions about the different meaning(analog/digital) of photography, now. Finally, this thesis emphasizes and concludes that the photographic ontological crisis reflects to the paradoxical dynamic structure, that unsolved the origins of the medium, itself. Moreover, even photography is not single identity of the photographic ontology, and also can not be understood as having a static identity or singular status from the dynamic field of technologies, practices, and images.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.29-62
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• 2012

As distribution environment is changing rapidly and competition is more intensive in the channel of distribution, the importance of retailer image and retailer equity is increasing as a different competitive advantages. Also, consumers are not functionally oriented and that their behavior is significantly affected by the symbols such as retailer image which identify retailer in the market place. That is, consumers do not choose products or retailers for their material utilities but consume the symbolic meaning of those products or retailers as expressed in their self images. The concept of self-image congruence has been utilized by marketers and researchers as an aid in better understanding how consumers identify themselves with the brands they buy and the retailer they patronize. Although self-image congruity theory has been tested across many product categories, the theory has not been tested extensively in the retailing. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate the impact of self image congruence between retailer image and self image of consumer on retailer equity such as retailer awareness, retailer association, perceived retailer quality, and retailer loyalty. The purpose of this study is to find out whether retailer-self image congruence can be a new antecedent of retailer equity. In addition, this study tries to examine how four-dimensional retailer equity constructs (retailer awareness, retailer association, perceived retailer quality, and retailer loyalty) affect customers' repatronage intention. For this study, data were gathered by survey and analyzed by structural equation modeling. The sample size in the present study was 254. The reliability of the all seven dimensions was estimated with Cronbach's alpha, composite reliability values and average variance extracted values. We determined whether the measurement model supports the convergent validity and discriminant validity by Exploratory factor analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis. For each pair of constructs, the square root of the average variance extracted values exceeded their correlations, thus supporting the discriminant validity of the constructs. Hypotheses were tested using the AMOS 18.0. As expected, the image congruence hypotheses were supported. The greater the degree of congruence between retailer image and self-image, the more favorable were consumers' retailer evaluations. The all two retailer-self image congruence (actual self-image congruence and ideal self-image congruence) affected customer based retailer equity. This result means that retailer-self image congruence is important cue for customers to estimate retailer equity. In other words, consumers are often more likely to prefer products and retail stores that have images similar to their own self-image. Especially, it appeared that effect for the ideal self-image congruence was consistently larger than the actual self-image congruence on the retailer equity. The results mean that consumers prefer or search for stores that have images compatible with consumer's perception of ideal-self. In addition, this study revealed that customers' estimations toward customer based retailer equity affected the repatronage intention. The results showed that all four dimensions (retailer awareness, retailer association, perceived retailer quality, and retailer loyalty) had positive effect on the repatronage intention. That is, management and investment to improve image congruence between retailer and consumers' self make customers' positive evaluation of retailer equity, and then the positive customer based retailer equity can enhance the repatonage intention. And to conclude, retailer's image management is an important part of successful retailer performance management, and the retailer-self image congruence is an important antecedent of retailer equity. Therefore, it is more important to develop and improve retailer's image similar to consumers' image. Given the pressure to provide increased image congruence, it is not surprising that retailers have made significant investments in enhancing the fit between retailer image and self image of consumer. The enhancing such self-image congruence may allow marketers to target customers who may be influenced by image appeals in advertising.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.19-32
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• 2010

Volatility plays a central role in both academic and practical applications, especially in pricing financial derivative products and trading volatility strategies. This study presents a novel mechanism based on generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) models that is able to enhance the performance of intelligent volatility trading systems by predicting Korean stock market volatility more accurately. In particular, we embedded the concept of the volatility asymmetry documented widely in the literature into our model. The newly developed Korean stock market volatility index of KOSPI 200, VKOSPI, is used as a volatility proxy. It is the price of a linear portfolio of the KOSPI 200 index options and measures the effect of the expectations of dealers and option traders on stock market volatility for 30 calendar days. The KOSPI 200 index options market started in 1997 and has become the most actively traded market in the world. Its trading volume is more than 10 million contracts a day and records the highest of all the stock index option markets. Therefore, analyzing the VKOSPI has great importance in understanding volatility inherent in option prices and can afford some trading ideas for futures and option dealers. Use of the VKOSPI as volatility proxy avoids statistical estimation problems associated with other measures of volatility since the VKOSPI is model-free expected volatility of market participants calculated directly from the transacted option prices. This study estimates the symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models for the KOSPI 200 index from January 2003 to December 2006 by the maximum likelihood procedure. Asymmetric GARCH models include GJR-GARCH model of Glosten, Jagannathan and Runke, exponential GARCH model of Nelson and power autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) of Ding, Granger and Engle. Symmetric GARCH model indicates basic GARCH (1, 1). Tomorrow's forecasted value and change direction of stock market volatility are obtained by recursive GARCH specifications from January 2007 to December 2009 and are compared with the VKOSPI. Empirical results indicate that negative unanticipated returns increase volatility more than positive return shocks of equal magnitude decrease volatility, indicating the existence of volatility asymmetry in the Korean stock market. The point value and change direction of tomorrow VKOSPI are estimated and forecasted by GARCH models. Volatility trading system is developed using the forecasted change direction of the VKOSPI, that is, if tomorrow VKOSPI is expected to rise, a long straddle or strangle position is established. A short straddle or strangle position is taken if VKOSPI is expected to fall tomorrow. Total profit is calculated as the cumulative sum of the VKOSPI percentage change. If forecasted direction is correct, the absolute value of the VKOSPI percentage changes is added to trading profit. It is subtracted from the trading profit if forecasted direction is not correct. For the in-sample period, the power ARCH model best fits in a statistical metric, Mean Squared Prediction Error (MSPE), and the exponential GARCH model shows the highest Mean Correct Prediction (MCP). The power ARCH model best fits also for the out-of-sample period and provides the highest probability for the VKOSPI change direction tomorrow. Generally, the power ARCH model shows the best fit for the VKOSPI. All the GARCH models provide trading profits for volatility trading system and the exponential GARCH model shows the best performance, annual profit of 197.56%, during the in-sample period. The GARCH models present trading profits during the out-of-sample period except for the exponential GARCH model. During the out-of-sample period, the power ARCH model shows the largest annual trading profit of 38%. The volatility clustering and asymmetry found in this research are the reflection of volatility non-linearity. This further suggests that combining the asymmetric GARCH models and artificial neural networks can significantly enhance the performance of the suggested volatility trading system, since artificial neural networks have been shown to effectively model nonlinear relationships.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.195-211
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• 2014

Cloud computing services provide IT resources as services on demand. This is considered a key concept, which will lead a shift from an ownership-based paradigm to a new pay-for-use paradigm, which can reduce the fixed cost for IT resources, and improve flexibility and scalability. As IT services, cloud services have evolved from early similar computing concepts such as network computing, utility computing, server-based computing, and grid computing. So research into cloud computing is highly related to and combined with various relevant computing research areas. To seek promising research issues and topics in cloud computing, it is necessary to understand the research trends in cloud computing more comprehensively. In this study, we collect bibliographic information and citation information for cloud computing related research papers published in major international journals from 1994 to 2012, and analyzes macroscopic trends and network changes to citation relationships among papers and the co-occurrence relationships of key words by utilizing social network analysis measures. Through the analysis, we can identify the relationships and connections among research topics in cloud computing related areas, and highlight new potential research topics. In addition, we visualize dynamic changes of research topics relating to cloud computing using a proposed cloud computing "research trend map." A research trend map visualizes positions of research topics in two-dimensional space. Frequencies of key words (X-axis) and the rates of increase in the degree centrality of key words (Y-axis) are used as the two dimensions of the research trend map. Based on the values of the two dimensions, the two dimensional space of a research map is divided into four areas: maturation, growth, promising, and decline. An area with high keyword frequency, but low rates of increase of degree centrality is defined as a mature technology area; the area where both keyword frequency and the increase rate of degree centrality are high is defined as a growth technology area; the area where the keyword frequency is low, but the rate of increase in the degree centrality is high is defined as a promising technology area; and the area where both keyword frequency and the rate of degree centrality are low is defined as a declining technology area. Based on this method, cloud computing research trend maps make it possible to easily grasp the main research trends in cloud computing, and to explain the evolution of research topics. According to the results of an analysis of citation relationships, research papers on security, distributed processing, and optical networking for cloud computing are on the top based on the page-rank measure. From the analysis of key words in research papers, cloud computing and grid computing showed high centrality in 2009, and key words dealing with main elemental technologies such as data outsourcing, error detection methods, and infrastructure construction showed high centrality in 2010~2011. In 2012, security, virtualization, and resource management showed high centrality. Moreover, it was found that the interest in the technical issues of cloud computing increases gradually. From annual cloud computing research trend maps, it was verified that security is located in the promising area, virtualization has moved from the promising area to the growth area, and grid computing and distributed system has moved to the declining area. The study results indicate that distributed systems and grid computing received a lot of attention as similar computing paradigms in the early stage of cloud computing research. The early stage of cloud computing was a period focused on understanding and investigating cloud computing as an emergent technology, linking to relevant established computing concepts. After the early stage, security and virtualization technologies became main issues in cloud computing, which is reflected in the movement of security and virtualization technologies from the promising area to the growth area in the cloud computing research trend maps. Moreover, this study revealed that current research in cloud computing has rapidly transferred from a focus on technical issues to for a focus on application issues, such as SLAs (Service Level Agreements).

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.141-166
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• 2019

Recently, channels like social media and SNS create enormous amount of data. In all kinds of data, portions of unstructured data which represented as text data has increased geometrically. But there are some difficulties to check all text data, so it is important to access those data rapidly and grasp key points of text. Due to needs of efficient understanding, many studies about text summarization for handling and using tremendous amounts of text data have been proposed. Especially, a lot of summarization methods using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms have been proposed lately to generate summary objectively and effectively which called "automatic summarization". However almost text summarization methods proposed up to date construct summary focused on frequency of contents in original documents. Those summaries have a limitation for contain small-weight subjects that mentioned less in original text. If summaries include contents with only major subject, bias occurs and it causes loss of information so that it is hard to ascertain every subject documents have. To avoid those bias, it is possible to summarize in point of balance between topics document have so all subject in document can be ascertained, but still unbalance of distribution between those subjects remains. To retain balance of subjects in summary, it is necessary to consider proportion of every subject documents originally have and also allocate the portion of subjects equally so that even sentences of minor subjects can be included in summary sufficiently. In this study, we propose "subject-balanced" text summarization method that procure balance between all subjects and minimize omission of low-frequency subjects. For subject-balanced summary, we use two concept of summary evaluation metrics "completeness" and "succinctness". Completeness is the feature that summary should include contents of original documents fully and succinctness means summary has minimum duplication with contents in itself. Proposed method has 3-phases for summarization. First phase is constructing subject term dictionaries. Topic modeling is used for calculating topic-term weight which indicates degrees that each terms are related to each topic. From derived weight, it is possible to figure out highly related terms for every topic and subjects of documents can be found from various topic composed similar meaning terms. And then, few terms are selected which represent subject well. In this method, it is called "seed terms". However, those terms are too small to explain each subject enough, so sufficient similar terms with seed terms are needed for well-constructed subject dictionary. Word2Vec is used for word expansion, finds similar terms with seed terms. Word vectors are created after Word2Vec modeling, and from those vectors, similarity between all terms can be derived by using cosine-similarity. Higher cosine similarity between two terms calculated, higher relationship between two terms defined. So terms that have high similarity values with seed terms for each subjects are selected and filtering those expanded terms subject dictionary is finally constructed. Next phase is allocating subjects to every sentences which original documents have. To grasp contents of all sentences first, frequency analysis is conducted with specific terms that subject dictionaries compose. TF-IDF weight of each subjects are calculated after frequency analysis, and it is possible to figure out how much sentences are explaining about each subjects. However, TF-IDF weight has limitation that the weight can be increased infinitely, so by normalizing TF-IDF weights for every subject sentences have, all values are changed to 0 to 1 values. Then allocating subject for every sentences with maximum TF-IDF weight between all subjects, sentence group are constructed for each subjects finally. Last phase is summary generation parts. Sen2Vec is used to figure out similarity between subject-sentences, and similarity matrix can be formed. By repetitive sentences selecting, it is possible to generate summary that include contents of original documents fully and minimize duplication in summary itself. For evaluation of proposed method, 50,000 reviews of TripAdvisor are used for constructing subject dictionaries and 23,087 reviews are used for generating summary. Also comparison between proposed method summary and frequency-based summary is performed and as a result, it is verified that summary from proposed method can retain balance of all subject more which documents originally have.

• The Korean Society of Law and Medicine
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.29-74
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• 2022

As social disasters occur under the Disaster Management Act, which can damage the people's "life, body, and property" due to the rapid spread and spread of unexpected COVID-19 infectious diseases in 2020, information collected through inspection and reporting of infectious disease pathogens (Article 11), epidemiological investigation (Article 18), epidemiological investigation for vaccination (Article 29), artificial technology, and prevention policy Decision), (3) It was used as an important basis for decision-making in the context of an infectious disease crisis, such as promoting vaccination and understanding the current status of damage. In addition, medical policy decisions using infectious disease data contribute to quarantine policy decisions, information provision, drug development, and research technology development, and interest in the legal scope and limitations of using infectious disease data has increased worldwide. The use of infectious disease data can be classified for the purpose of spreading and blocking infectious diseases, prevention, management, and treatment of infectious diseases, and the use of information will be more widely made in the context of an infectious disease crisis. In particular, as the serious stage of the Disaster Management Act continues, the processing of personal identification information and sensitive information becomes an important issue. Information on "medical records, vaccination drugs, vaccination, underlying diseases, health rankings, long-term care recognition grades, pregnancy, etc." needs to be interpreted. In the case of "prevention, management, and treatment of infectious diseases", it is difficult to clearly define the concept of medical practicesThe types of actions are judged based on "legislative purposes, academic principles, expertise, and social norms," but the balance of legal interests should be based on the need for data use in quarantine policies and urgent judgment in public health crises. Specifically, the speed and degree of transmission of infectious diseases in a crisis, whether the purpose can be achieved without processing sensitive information, whether it unfairly violates the interests of third parties or information subjects, and the effectiveness of introducing quarantine policies through processing sensitive information can be used as major evaluation factors. On the other hand, the collection, provision, and use of infectious disease data for research purposes will be used through pseudonym processing under the Personal Information Protection Act, consent under the Bioethics Act and deliberation by the Institutional Bioethics Committee, and data provision deliberation committee. Therefore, the use of research purposes is recognized as long as procedural validity is secured as it is reviewed by the pseudonym processing and data review committee, the consent of the information subject, and the institutional bioethics review committee. However, the burden on research managers should be reduced by clarifying the pseudonymization or anonymization procedures, the introduction or consent procedures of the comprehensive consent system and the opt-out system should be clearly prepared, and the procedure for re-identifying or securing security that may arise from technological development should be clearly defined.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.247-269
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• 2007

In recent years, one of the major reasons for the fierce competition amongst firms is that they strive to increase their own market shares and customer acquisition rate in the same market with similar and apparently undifferentiated products in terms of quality and perceived benefit. Because of this change in recent marketing environment, the differentiated after-sales service and diversified promotion strategies have become more important to gain competitive advantage. Price promotion is the favorite strategy that most retailers use to achieve short-term sales increase, induce consumer's brand switch, in troduce new product into market, and so forth. However, if marketers apply or copy an identical price promotion strategy without considering the characteristic differences in product and consumer preference, it will cause serious problems because discounted price itself could make people skeptical about product quality, and the changes of perceived value might appear differently depending on other factors such as consumer involvement or brand attitude. Previous studies showed that price promotion would certainly increase sales, and the discounted price compared to regular price would enhance the consumer's perceived values. On the other hand, discounted price itself could make people depreciate or skeptical about product quality, and reduce the consumers' positivity bias because consumers might be unsure whether the current price promotion is the retailer's best price offer. Moreover, we cannot say that discounted price absolutely enhances the consumer's perceived values regardless of product category and purchase situations. That is, the factors that affect consumers' value perceptions and buying behavior are so diverse in reality that the results of studies on the same dependent variable come out differently depending on what variable was used or how experiment conditions were designed. Majority of previous researches on the effect of price-comparison advertising have used consumers' buying behavior as dependent variable. In order to figure out consumers' buying behavior theoretically, analysis of value perceptions which influence buying intentions is needed. In addition, they did not combined the independent variables such as brand loyalty and price discount rate together. For this reason, this paper tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception. And we provided with theoretical and managerial implications that marketers need to consider such variables as product attributes, brand loyalty, and consumer involvement at the same time, and then establish a differentiated pricing strategy case by case in order to enhance consumer's perceived values properl. Three research concepts were used in our study and each concept based on past researches was defined. The perceived acquisition value in this study was defined as the perceived net gains associated with the products or services acquired. That is, the perceived acquisition value of the product will be positively influenced by the benefits buyers believe they are getting by acquiring and using the product, and negatively influenced by the money given up to acquire the product. And the perceived transaction value was defined as the perception of psychological satisfaction or pleasure obtained from taking advantage of the financial terms of the price deal. Lastly, the brand loyalty was defined as favorable attitude towards a purchased product. Thus, a consumer loyal to a brand has an emotional attachment to the brand or firm. Repeat purchasers continue to buy the same brand even though they do not have an emotional attachment to it. We assumed that if the degree of brand loyalty is high, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value will increase when higher discount rate is provided. But we found that there are no significant differences in values between two different discount rates as a result of empirical analysis. It means that price reduction did not affect consumer's brand choice significantly because the perceived sacrifice decreased only a little, and customers are satisfied with product's benefits when brand loyalty is high. From the result, we confirmed that consumers with high degree of brand loyalty to a specific product are less sensitive to price change. Thus, using price promotion strategy to merely expect sale increase is not recommendable. Instead of discounting price, marketers need to strengthen consumers' brand loyalty and maintain the skimming strategy. On the contrary, when the degree of brand loyalty is low, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value decreased significantly when higher discount rate is provided. Generally brands that are considered inferior might be able to draw attention away from the quality of the product by making consumers focus more on the sacrifice component of price. But considering the fact that consumers with low degree of brand loyalty are known to be unsatisfied with product's benefits and have relatively negative brand attitude, bigger price reduction offered in experiment condition of this paper made consumers depreciate product's quality and benefit more and more, and consumer's psychological perceived sacrifice increased while perceived values decreased accordingly. We infer that, in the case of inferior brand, a drastic price-cut or frequent price promotion may increase consumers' uncertainty about overall components of product. Therefore, it appears that reinforcing the augmented product such as after-sale service, delivery and giving credit which is one of the levels consisting of product would be more effective in reality. This will be better rather than competing with product that holds high brand loyalty by reducing sale price. Although this study tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception, there are several limitations. This study was conducted in controlled conditions where the high involvement product and two different levels of discount rate were applied. Given the presence of low involvement product, when both pieces of information are available, it is likely that the results we have reported here may have been different. Thus, this research results explain only the specific situation. Second, the sample selected in this study was university students in their twenties, so we cannot say that the results are firmly effective to all generations. Future research that manipulates the level of discount along with the consumer involvement might lead to a more robust understanding of the effects various discount rate. And, we used a cellular phone as a product stimulus, so it would be very interesting to analyze the result when the product stimulus is an intangible product such as service. It could be also valuable to analyze whether the change of perceived value affects consumers' final buying behavior positively or negatively.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.1-23
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• 2013

To discover significant social issues such as unemployment, economy crisis, social welfare etc. that are urgent issues to be solved in a modern society, in the existing approach, researchers usually collect opinions from professional experts and scholars through either online or offline surveys. However, such a method does not seem to be effective from time to time. As usual, due to the problem of expense, a large number of survey replies are seldom gathered. In some cases, it is also hard to find out professional persons dealing with specific social issues. Thus, the sample set is often small and may have some bias. Furthermore, regarding a social issue, several experts may make totally different conclusions because each expert has his subjective point of view and different background. In this case, it is considerably hard to figure out what current social issues are and which social issues are really important. To surmount the shortcomings of the current approach, in this paper, we develop a prototype system that semi-automatically detects social issue keywords representing social issues and problems from about 1.3 million news articles issued by about 10 major domestic presses in Korea from June 2009 until July 2012. Our proposed system consists of (1) collecting and extracting texts from the collected news articles, (2) identifying only news articles related to social issues, (3) analyzing the lexical items of Korean sentences, (4) finding a set of topics regarding social keywords over time based on probabilistic topic modeling, (5) matching relevant paragraphs to a given topic, and (6) visualizing social keywords for easy understanding. In particular, we propose a novel matching algorithm relying on generative models. The goal of our proposed matching algorithm is to best match paragraphs to each topic. Technically, using a topic model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we can obtain a set of topics, each of which has relevant terms and their probability values. In our problem, given a set of text documents (e.g., news articles), LDA shows a set of topic clusters, and then each topic cluster is labeled by human annotators, where each topic label stands for a social keyword. For example, suppose there is a topic (e.g., Topic1 = {(unemployment, 0.4), (layoff, 0.3), (business, 0.3)}) and then a human annotator labels "Unemployment Problem" on Topic1. In this example, it is non-trivial to understand what happened to the unemployment problem in our society. In other words, taking a look at only social keywords, we have no idea of the detailed events occurring in our society. To tackle this matter, we develop the matching algorithm that computes the probability value of a paragraph given a topic, relying on (i) topic terms and (ii) their probability values. For instance, given a set of text documents, we segment each text document to paragraphs. In the meantime, using LDA, we can extract a set of topics from the text documents. Based on our matching process, each paragraph is assigned to a topic, indicating that the paragraph best matches the topic. Finally, each topic has several best matched paragraphs. Furthermore, assuming there are a topic (e.g., Unemployment Problem) and the best matched paragraph (e.g., Up to 300 workers lost their jobs in XXX company at Seoul). In this case, we can grasp the detailed information of the social keyword such as "300 workers", "unemployment", "XXX company", and "Seoul". In addition, our system visualizes social keywords over time. Therefore, through our matching process and keyword visualization, most researchers will be able to detect social issues easily and quickly. Through this prototype system, we have detected various social issues appearing in our society and also showed effectiveness of our proposed methods according to our experimental results. Note that you can also use our proof-of-concept system in http://dslab.snu.ac.kr/demo.html.

• Korean Journal of Heritage: History & Science
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.172-205
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• 2011

Go bears significant meanings in terms of cultural and entertaining functions in Asia Eastern such as China and Japan. Beyond the mere entertaining level, it produces philosophical and mythic discourse as well. As a part of effort to seek an identity of Korean traditional garden culture, this study traced back to find meanings of rock-go-board and taste for the arts which ancestors pursued in playing Go game, through analysis and interpretation of correlation among origin of place name, nearby scenery, carved letters and vicinal handed-down place name. At the same time, their position, shape and location types were interpreted through comprehensive research and analysis of stone-go-boards including rock-go-board. Particularly, it focused on the rock names related to Sundoism(仙道) Ideal world, fixed due to a connection between traces of Sundoism and places in a folk etymology. Series of this work is to highlight features of the immortal sceneries, one of traditional landscaping ideals, by understanding place identity and scenic features of where the rock-go-boards are carved. These works are expected to become foundation for promotion and preservation of the traditional landscaping remains. The contents of this study could be summarized as follows; First, round stone and square board for round sky and angled land, black and white color for harmony of yin and yang and 361paths for rotating sky are symbols projecting order of universe. Sayings of Gyuljungjirak(橘中之樂), Sangsansaho(商山四皓), Nangagosa(爛柯故事) formed based on the idea of eternity stand for union of sky and sun. It indicates Go game which matches life and nature spatiotemporally and elegant taste for arts pursuing beauty and leisure. Second, the stone-go-boards found through this research, are 18 in total. 3 of those(16.1%), Gangjin Weolnamsaji, Yangsan Sohanjeong and Banryongdae ones were classified into movable Seokguk and 15(83.9%) including Banghakdong were turned out to be non-movable rock-go-boards carved on natural rocks. Third, upon the result of materializing location types of rock-go-boards, 15 are mountain stream type(83.9%) and 3 are rock peak type(16.1%). Among those, the one at Sobaeksam Sinseonbong is located at the highest place(1,389m). Considering the fact that all of 15 rock-go-boards were found at mountainous areas lower than 500m, it is recognizable that where the Go-boards are the parts of the living space, not far from secular world. Fourth, there are 7 Sunjang(巡將) Go with 17 Hwajeoms(花點), which is a traditional Go board type, but their existences, numbers and shapes of Hwajeom appear variously. Based on the fact, it is recognizable that culture of making go-board had been handed down for an extended period of time. Among the studied rock-goboards, the biggest one was Muju Sasunam[$80(82)cm{\times}80(82)cm$] while the smallest one was Yangsan Sohandjeong Seokguk ($40cm{\times}40cm$). The dimension of length and breadth are both $49cm{\times}48cm$ on average, which is realistic size for actual Go play. Fifth, the biggest bed rock, an under-masonry with carved Go-board on it, was one in Muju Sasunam[$8.7m{\times}7.5m(65.25m^2)$], followed by ones in Hoengseong Chuiseok[$7.8m{\times}6.3m(49.14m^2$] and Goisan Sungukam[$6.7m{\times}5.7m(37.14m^2)$]. Meanwhile, the smallest rock-go-board was turned out to be one in Seoul Banghak-dong. There was no consistency in directions of the Go-boards, which gives a hint that geographical features and sceneries of locations were considered first and then these were carved toward an optimal direction corresponding to the conditions. Sixth, rock-go-boards were all located in valleys and peaks of mountains with breathtaking scenery. It seems closely related to ancestors' taste for arts. Particularly, rock-go-boards are apprehended as facilities related to taste for arts for having leisure in many mountains and big streams under the idea of union of sky and human as a primitive communal line. Go became a medium of hermits, which is a traditional image of Go-game, and symbol of amusement and entertainment with the idea that Go is an essence of scholar culture enabling to reach the Tao of turning back to nature. Seventh, the further ancient time going back to, the more dreamlike the Go-boards are. It is an evident for that Sundoism, which used to be unacceptable once, became more visible and realistic. Considering the high relation between rock-go-boards and Sundoism relevant names such as Sundoism peak in Danyang Sobaeksan, 4 hermits rock in Muju and Sundoism hermit rock in Jangsu, Sundoism hermit rocks and rock-go-boards are sceneries and observation spots to express a communication of worship and longing for Sundoism. Eighth, 3 elements-physical environment such as location type of the rock-go-boards, human activities concentrated on 8 sceneries and Dongcheongugok(洞天九曲) setup and relevancy to Confucian scholars, as well as 'Sangsansaho' motif and 'Nangagosa' symbolic meaning were used as interpretation tools in order to judge the place identity. Upon the result, spatial investigation is required with respect to Sunyoodongcheon(仙遊洞天) concept based on enjoyment to unify with the nature rather than Dongcheongugok concept of neo-Confucian, for Dongcheon and Dongmoon(洞門) motives carved around the rock-go-boards. Generally, places where mountain stream type rock-go-boards were formed were hermit spaces of Confucianism or Sundoism. They are considered to have compromised one other with the change of times. Particularly, in the rock-go-board at the mountain peak, sublimity-oriented advent of Sundoism is considered as a significant factor to control place identity. Ninth, including where the rock-go-boards were established, the vicinal areas are well-known as parts of Dongcheongugok and Palkyung(八景) mostly. In addition, many of Sundoism relevant expressions were discovered even in the neighboring carvings written by scholars and nobility, which means sophisticated taste based on longing for Sundoism world played a significant role in making go-board. The rock-go-board is an integration of cultural phenomena naturally managed by seclusion of scholars in the Joseon Dynasty as well as remains and essence of Korean traditional landscaping. Some rock-go-boards out of 17 discovered in South Korea, including ones in Sobaeksan Sinsunbong, Banghak-dong, Chungju Gongili, Muju Sasunam, Yangsan Eogokdong Banryongdae Seokguk, are damaged such as cracks in rocks or fainted lines by hardships of time and hand stains. Worse yet, in case of Eunyang Bangudae Jipcheongjeong board, it is very difficult to identify the shape due to being buried. Rock-go-boards are valuable sculptures in terms of cultural asset and artwork since they reflect ancestors' love for nature and longing for Sundoism world. Therefore, they should be maintained properly with right preservation method. Not only rock-boards itself but also peripheral places are excellent cultural heritages and crucial cultural assets. In addition, vicinal sceneries of where rock-goboards and pavilion spots are the representative remains of embracing prototype of Korean traditional landscaping and major parts of cultural properties.