• Proceedings of the Korean DIstribution Association Conference
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• 2003.02a
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• pp.123-166
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• 2003

Marketing channel is recognized as one of the society systems which have the character of functional organization. These organizations are related to each other for specialized and cooperative work. Channel members in distribution channel are striving to accomplish exchange through reciprocal action. Thus channel members exercise their power to take better position in exchange. There will be struggling between members about satisfaction and conflict during this power exercise. Now a days, buyers use more harsh power as large retail firms are increasing. This phenomenon is occurring in the distribution channel. However, there will be different phenomenon in case of agricultural products. Not like industrial product suppliers, agricultural product suppliers have various supply channels and many agricultural products are seasonal. It has also unstable amount supplies. There should be differentiated marketing in agricultural products. Relatively weaker powered suppliers have to strengthen comparative factors and also have to be technically specialized through assessed experience in order to establish strong product sales chain. Making a brand of agricultural product would be also a good idea to increase the product comparability. Channel members need to be recognized their specialized functions in order to make balanced distribution channel. There have to be conversion of concept of relation between suppliers and buyers from subordinate relationship to cooperative relationship.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.51-61
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• 2011

The concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was first introduced sixty years ago in the academic field. However, the phrase CSR was not explicitly stated before the 1990s in Korean business and academic researches. Recently CSR is more considered a corporate strategy than a philanthropic donation. CSR comprises contributions to local communities as well as using environmentally beneficial and humane practices. Sponsoring is one available marketing tactic used in order to communicate with the market. This study of sponsorship has concentrated on developing brand asset by accessing potential values of sporting events or star-players. However, sponsorship includes providing funds or goods to non-profit institutions as well as sports or entertainment organizations. Accordingly corporate community-specific sponsorship is defined as firms offering to provide money, goods and/or services to individuals and/or institutions within a particular community, thus establishing an interdependent relationship between the partners aspiring to gain social and economic assets. National sponsorship is typically targeted toward commonly recognized individuals and/or organizations with the intent to maximize exposure of a sponsor's brand, and is known to positively affect brand equity(community-specific sponsorship is committed to a limited local area) that a firm could benefit from by gaining a specific asset. POSCO sponsors the Jukdo Market, locate dinthe city of Pohang, tohelp revive their traditional market. Inreturn, the Jukdo Market merchant suni on display sflags with the POSCO embleminfrontof stores with in the market intending to make shopper sand merchant saware of POSCO's sponsorship. POSCO has succeeded in acquiring public support from the citizens of Pohang. However, the economic effects resulting from the cooperative relationship between POSCO and the Jukdo Market have yet to be measured by any empirical research. The purpose of this study is to assess the economic effects created by the community-specific sponsorship from the groups of merchants and shoppers, measuring its influence on the corporate image and subsequent brand loyalty, as parts of brand equity. The result of the study shows that the community-specific sponsorship of POSCO of the Jukdo Market had different influences on its corporate image and the brand loyalty of shoppers and merchants. First, the merchant group who was more frequently exposed to POSCO's flag recognized the sponsorship of POSCO more than the shopper group, and, therefore, had a better image of the company. Second, the recognition of POSCO's sponsorship had a positive influence on its corporate image, and that positive corporate image had a positive effect on brand loyalty development. However, the recognition of the sponsorship did not have a direct influence on brand loyalty. The friendly corporate image developed by the recognition of the sponsorship consequently could have had an effect on brand loyalty. Therefore, companies should not relinquish investments to corporate image development if they require more brand loyalty. Third, the influence of corporate image on brand loyalty shows stronger results in the shopper group rather than in the merchant group. Psycho-graphic factors of shoppers and merchants might give rise to the difference between the two groups.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.305-316
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• 2011

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.143-167
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to analyze changes of innovation activities and their performance in pre-IPO and post-IPO of KOSDAQ IPO listed companies in medical and pharmaceutical fields, which require high R&D investment, from 2000 to 2005 in Korea. The innovation efficiencies of the IPO companies were measured before and after three years based on the DEA model. The financial data and patent information of the listed company during total 6 years, which were 3 years before IPO and 3 years after IPO, were collected. The main results of this research are as follows. First, it took an average 12.86 years until IPO in the start-up of the IPO companies in the pharmaceutical sector, and innovation was on average more active than the IPO before. R&D investment was higher than the IPO before, and the number of the applied patent during 3 years after IPO was 16.67 which was increased from 8.43 during 3 years before IPO. In addition, the average scope of technology of the IPO companies was expanded from 11 to 22 technology fields during previous 3 year and after 3 year each, and financial growth after IPO was lower than the previous IPO. Second, the financial performance of R&D investment and the performance of patent activity were weakened in the efficiency after the IPO, and the integrated performance from the patenting activities and the R&D investment was decreased after the IPO. Finally, the efficiency of the financial performance of the patenting activity was lower than the efficiency of the financial performance of the patent and R&D investment and patent activities under the R&D investment. In particular, the inefficiency of the firms' patenting activities performance after the IPO was caused by the decreasing return to scale, according to the results of this study. This results implicate that the expansion of R&D investments through the IPO had not lead to the financial performance of the market, and that the overall inefficiency since the IPO is due to the inefficiencies at the stage for the outcome of innovation activity rather than the output obtained through the R&D investments that appear to lead the performance of the market.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.235-259
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• 2014

New product or new technology developments are directly linked to a firm's survival and thus their performance and improvement are gaining attention in the midst of rapidly changing business environment and aggravating competition. However, despite SMEs' significance in the national economy, they are limited in terms of size and resources in possession, so the government provides a variety of supports as a policy. According to a study on the organizational life cycle, a firm's limits and difficulties differ by growth stage, so the supports need to be tailored. Based on the data from 2,575 firms that responded to the "2011 SMEs Technological Statistics," how technological capability level and deviation in the R&D process affect the R&D sales performance was studied. The result of analysis revealed that the technological capability has a positive impact on the R&D sales performance. It was also learned that the relationship between deviation in the technological capability and R&D sales performance was moderated by the government support. For the hypothesis that the government support would have a different moderating effect by growth stage for the impact the technology level has on the R&D sales performance, the empirical analysis showed a different meaningful moderating effect for each growth stage. The theoretical implications of the study are that, instead of a simple relation of dynamics that does not take the growth stages into account, it suggested a more realistic causal relationship model that reflects the complex environment the SMEs are in and that the need for measuring and using the deviation in technological capability as a research variable has been justified. The practical implications are that the government policy for supports can be tailored to a growth stage and that the guidelines have been suggested to effectively use the government funding by encouraging the SMEs in a different growth stage to adapt to the customized policy.

• Journal of the Korea Organic Resources Recycling Association
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.63-75
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• 2004

This research sought to determine the status of the installation and operation of domestic public resource-making facilities of resource-making facilities and come up with corresponding improvement measures. Currently compost is most numerous set-up out of facilties already established ever since, then the rest of them are feeds, anaerobic degradation, sewage combination, and combination of compost and feeds in order. As such, food waste is processed more into compost than into feeds, presumably because relevant facilities, which were originally designed for processing into feeds, were converted into composting facilities due to little demand for the processed feeds. The finding says that many related firms had yet to register their businesses in accordance with feeds and fertilizers management laws, and that food waste resources-making facilities used various basic facilities but few of them treated food waste in linkage with leaching water, bad odors, and energy. Some of current facilities were found to be 7 years old and thus outdated. Due to lack of skilled operational manpower, many facilities had less than 300 days of normal operation yearly, and some needed minor and serious repairs periodically. In overall facilities, 87% of the planned food waste was rolled in, thus requiring measures to treat the whole planned volume. For costs of resource-making facilities, some with a capacity of below 50 tons topped 100 million won, and facilities with a capacity of over 50 tons required less installation costs. Overall, installation costs ranged from 10 million to 20 million, and to 200 million won per ton, and this suggests a need to establish the installation cost calculation criteria, as well as to reshape the facility criteria. With operating costs varying greatly according to the size and treatment methods of facilities, the finding indicates a need to rationalize the operating costs, and to plan appropriate-size installation and operation of facilities to ensure economic operation.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.149-163
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• 2010

Previous studies have shown that retail price promotion change consumers' purchase behavior and that retailers use price promotion more frequently. Keeping constant the benefits received by consumers, there are several ways for retailers to communicate a price promotion. For example, retailers can present a price reduction in absolute terms ($, ${\euro}$), percentage terms (%), or some combinations of these two methods (Della Bitta et al. 1981). Communicating a price promotion in different ways is similar to the framing of purchase decisions (Monroe 1990). Framing effects refers to the finding that subjects respond differently to different descriptions of the same decision question (Frisch 1993). Thus, the presentation of the promotion has an impact on consumer deal evaluation and hence retail sales. In fact, much research in marketing attests to the effects of price presentation on deal perception (Lichtenstein and Bearden 1989; Urbany et al. 1988; Yadav and Monroe 1993). In this sense, a number of marketing researches have argued that deal perceptions are also determined by the degree to which consumers are able to calculate the discounts and final purchase prices accurately (Estelami 2003a; Morwitz et al. 1998), which suggests that marketers may be able to enhance responses to discounts by improving calculation accuracy. Consequently, since calculation inaccuracies in the aggregate lead to the underestimation of discounts (Kim and Kramer 2006), consumers are more likely to appreciate a discounted offer following deeper processing of price information that enables them to evaluate a price discount more accurately. The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of different presentations of discount prices on consumer price perceptions. To be more precise, the purpose of this study is to investigate how different implementations of the same price promotion (semantic and visual salience) affect consumers' perceptions of the promotion and their purchase decisions. Specifically, the analysis will focus on the effect of price presentation on evaluation, purchase intentions and perception of savings. In order to verify the hypotheses proposed in the research, this paper will present an experimental analysis dealing with several discount presentations. In this sense, a2 (Numerical salience presentation: absolute and relative) x2 (Worded salience presentation: novel and traditional) x2 (Visual salience: red and blue) design was employed to investigate the effects of discount presentation on three dependent variables: evaluation, purchase intentions and perception of savings. Respondents were exposed to a hypothetical advertisement that they had to evaluate and were informed of the offer conditions. Once the sample finished evaluating the advertisement, they answered a questionnaire related to price salience and dependent dimensions. Then, manipulation checks were conducted to ensure that respondents remembered their treatment conditions. Next, a $2{\times}2{\times}2$ MANOVA and follow-up univariate tests were conducted to verify the research hypotheses suggested and to examine the effects of the individual factors (price salience) on evaluation, purchase intentions and perceived savings. The results of this research show that semantic and visual salience presentations have significant main effects and interactions on evaluation, purchase intentions and perception of savings. Significant numerical salience interactions affected evaluation and purchase intentions. Additionally, a significant worded salience main effect on perception of savings and interactions on evaluation and purchase intentions were found. Finally, visual salience interactions have significant effects on evaluation. The main findings of this research suggest practical implications that firms should consider when planning promotion-based discounts to attract consumer attention. Consequently, because price presentation has important effects on consumer perception, retailers should consider which effect is wanted in order to design an effective discount presentaion. Specifically, retailers should present discounts with a traditional style that facilitates final price calculation. It is thus important to investigate ways in which marketers can enhance the accuracy of consumers' mental arithmetic to improve responses to price discounts. This preliminary study on the effect of price presentation on consumer perception and purchase intentions opens the line of research for further research. The results obtained in this research may have been determined by a number of limiting conceptual and methodological factors. In this sense, the research deals with a variety of discount presentations as well as with their effects; however, the analysis could include additional salience dimensions and effects on consumers. Furthermore, a similar study could be carried out including a larger, more inclusive and heterogeneous sample of consumers. In addition, the experiment did not require sample individuals to actually buy the product, so it is advisable to compare the effects obtained in the research with real consumer behavior and perception.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.123-134
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• 2010

Considering the benefits for both consumers and suppliers, firms are taking advantage of the Internet as a medium to communicate with and sell products to their consumers. This trend makes the online shopping environment a growing field for both researchers and practitioners. This paper contributes by testing a model of online consumer behavior with websites varying in levels of hedonism. Unlike past studies, we included all three types of emotions (arousal, pleasure, and dominance) and flow into the model. In this study, we assumed that website interfaces, such as background colors, music, and fonts impact the three types of emotions at the initial exposure to the site (Mazaheri, Richard, and Laroche, 2011). In turn, these emotions influence flow and consumers' perceptions of the site atmospherics-perception of site informativeness, effectiveness, and entertainment. This assumption is consistent with Zajonc (1980) who argued that affective reactions are independent of perceptual and cognitive operations and can influence responses. We, then, propose that the perceptions of site atmospherics along with flow, influence customers' attitudes toward the website and toward the product, site involvement, and purchase intentions. In addition, we studied the moderating impact of the level of hedonism of websites on all the relationship in the model. Thus, the path coefficients were compared between "high" and "low" hedonic websites. We used 39 real websites from 12 product categories (8 services and 4 physical goods) to test the model. Among them, 20 were perceived as high hedonic and 19 as low hedonic by the respondents. The result of EQS 6.1 support the overall model: $\chi^2$=1787 (df=504), CFI=.994; RMSEA=.031. All the hypotheses were significant. In addition, the results of multi-groups analyses reveal several non-invariant structural paths between high and low hedonic website groups. The findings supported the model regarding the influence of the three types of emotions on customers' perceptions of site atmospherics, flow, and other customer behavior variables. It was found that pleasure strongly influenced site attitudes and perceptions of site entertainment. Arousal positively impacted the other two types of emotions, perceptions of site informativeness, and site involvement. Additionally, the influence of arousal on flow was found to be highly significant. The results suggested a strong association between dominance and customers' perceptions of site effectiveness. Dominance was also found to be associated with site attitudes and flow. Moreover, the findings suggested that site involvement and attitudes toward the product are the most important antecedents of purchase intentions. Site informativeness and flow also significantly influenced purchase intentions. The results of multi-group analysis supported the moderating impacts of hedonism of the websites. Compared to low (high) hedonic sites, the impacts of utilitarian (hedonic) attributes on other variables were stronger in high (low) hedonic websites. Among the three types of emotions, dominance (controlling feelings) effects were stronger in high hedonic sites and pleasure effects were stronger in low hedonic sites. Moreover, the impact of site informativeness was stronger for high hedonic websites compared to their low-hedonic counterparts. On the other hand, the influence of effectiveness of information on perceptions of site informativeness and the impact of site involvement on product attitudes were stronger for low hedonic websites than for high hedonic ones.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.1-22
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• 2007

Customer satisfaction is important in an increasingly competitive and global marketplace. This implies that customer service is a critical factor for many organizations. In service encounter context, customer satisfaction is affected by employees' attitudes and behaviors. Accordingly, service firms have been focusing on selecting high quality of service employees, which resulted the ability to identify and select quality service- or customer- oriented employees to become critical for an organization's success. It was suggested that customer service orientation links to performance and subsequent organizational revenue. Moreover, it was found that service encounter failures were among the major reasons for customers' service switch. Therefore, the selection of customer service oriented employees is a key factor in establishing customer service - a potential source of sustained competitive advantage. However, the measurement of employee service orientation is more confusing than that of definitive answers. The difficulty of measuring service orientation is attributed to the use of broad versus narrow measures of personality. Advocates for the broad perspective prefer using basic personality constructs, such as the Big Five personality traits. On the contrary, the latter prefer a construct-oriented approach of personality research that provides a better measure of job performance because it requires the specification of the relationship of the personality traits with multiple dimensions of job performance. The customer service orientation was defined as "a set of basic individual predispositions and an inclination to provide service, to be courteous and to be helpful in dealing with customers and associates." Similarly, it is a fact that the Big five personality traits are predictors of customer orientation, and employee's self- and supervisor performance. They propose that basic personality traits may be too far removed from focal service behaviors to be able to predict specific service behaviors (customer orientation) and service worker performance. Also, customer orientation is defined as "an employee's tendency or predisposition to meet customer needs in an on-the-job context." This means that people who have job-relevant personality traits such as concern, empathy, and conscientiousness will be more adept at customer service than people who do not possess these traits. However, little attention has been given to the exploration of the service orientation of customer-contact employees who play a key role in creating satisfactory service encounters in the hospitality industry except for Kim, McCahon, & Miller (2003)'s study, especially in family restaurants context. Thus, the purposes of this study are to examine and validate the customer service orientation of customer-contact employees using the instrument developed by Donavan (1999) in Korean family restaurants, because the scale was developed to measure the personality traits related job behaviors. And this study explores the relationships between customer service orientation, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and self service performance using structural equation modeling (SEM). And this study explores the relationships between customer service orientation, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and self service performance using structural equation modeling (SEM). For these purposes the author developed several hypotheses as follows: H1: Employee's service orientation is associated with service performance. H2: Employee's service orientation is positively associated with job satisfaction. H3: Employee's service orientation is positively associated with organizational commitment. H4: Service performance is positively associated with job satisfaction. H5: Service performance is positively associated with organizational commitment. H6: Job satisfaction is negatively associated with organizational commitment. The data were collected from 278 employees in 5 deluxe hotels located in Pusan, Korea. The researcher contacted the manager of the restaurants, and managers consented to administer surveys to their employees. The survey was executed during one month period in the October of 2007. The data were analyzed with structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.7 W. The result of the overall model analysis appeared as follows: $X^2$=122.638 (p = 0.00), df=59, GFI=.936, AGFI=.901, NFI=.948, CFI=.971, RMSEA=.0625. Since the result of the overall model analysis demonstrated a good fit, we could further analyze our data. The findings can be summarized as follows: First, the greater the employee service orientation, the greater the service performance. Second, the greater the employee service orientation, the greater the job satisfaction. Third, the greater the employee service orientation, the greater the organizational commitment. Fourth, the greater the service performance, the greater the job satisfaction. Fifth, the greater the service performance, the greater the organizational commitment. Finally, the greater the job satisfaction, the greater the organizational commitment. Seventh, the greater the customer satisfaction, the greater the customer loyalty.

• Journal of Korea Port Economic Association
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• v.36 no.2
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• pp.19-36
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• 2020

The bidding phase for logistics outsourcing services is critical for both shippers and logistics companies. According to the logistics bidding phase, the shipper should provide logistics operation information to logistics companies to resolve uncertainty. In addition, the logistics company can win the contract volume that was placed in the bid by expressing their experience and know-how, and proposing to share the risks and benefits of the shipper's logistics operation. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the factors that can be identified during the bidding phase for logistics outsourcing and how these factors affect the satisfaction of logistics outsourcing services. Based on the factors identified in the preceding studies on logistics outsourcing partnership factors and those on logistics outsourcing determinants, a survey was conducted on experts engaged in logistics companies, performing logistics for domestic shippers and analyzed using Smart-PLS. This study presents the following implications. First, in the logistics bidding phase, the shipper should provide its logistics operation information to logistics firms to resolve uncertainties. Details An in-depth explanation of the operation details will be presented via the bidding presentation, and on-site tours of manufacturing plants and logistics centers should also be carried out if necessary. Second, in the bidding phase, logistics companies should appeal through proposals to their competitiveness, such as experience and knowledge of the logistics of the shipper, and also consider alliances with other logistics companies to supplement their insufficient logistics services. Third, logistics companies should make proposals to share profits and risks through logistics outsourcing during the bidding phase, propose accepting risks from environmental uncertainties of the shipper within its capacity to an acceptable extent, and share the benefits of carrying out the shipper's logistics.