• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.63-82
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• 2016

Individuals gather information online to resolve problems in their daily lives and make various decisions about the purchase of products or services. With the revolutionary development of information technology, Web 2.0 has allowed more people to easily generate and use online reviews such that the volume of information is rapidly increasing, and the usefulness and significance of analyzing the unstructured data have also increased. This paper presents an analysis on the lexical features of expert product reviews to determine their influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. The focus was on how unstructured data can be organized and used in diverse contexts through text mining. In addition, diverse lexical features of expert reviews of contents provided by a third-party review site were extracted and defined. Expert reviews are defined as evaluations by people who have expert knowledge about specific products or services in newspapers or magazines; this type of review is also called a critic review. Consumers who purchased products before the widespread use of the Internet were able to access expert reviews through newspapers or magazines; thus, they were not able to access many of them. Recently, however, major media also now provide online services so that people can more easily and affordably access expert reviews compared to the past. The reason why diverse reviews from experts in several fields are important is that there is an information asymmetry where some information is not shared among consumers and sellers. The information asymmetry can be resolved with information provided by third parties with expertise to consumers. Then, consumers can read expert reviews and make purchasing decisions by considering the abundant information on products or services. Therefore, expert reviews play an important role in consumers' purchasing decisions and the performance of companies across diverse industries. If the influence of qualitative data such as reviews or assessment after the purchase of products can be separately identified from the quantitative data resources, such as the actual quality of products or price, it is possible to identify which aspects of product reviews hamper or promote product sales. Previous studies have focused on the characteristics of the experts themselves, such as the expertise and credibility of sources regarding expert reviews; however, these studies did not suggest the influence of the linguistic features of experts' product reviews on consumers' overall evaluation. However, this study focused on experts' recommendations and evaluations to reveal the lexical features of expert reviews and whether such features influence consumers' overall evaluations and purchasing decisions. Real expert product reviews were analyzed based on the suggested methodology, and five lexical features of expert reviews were ultimately determined. Specifically, the "review depth" (i.e., degree of detail of the expert's product analysis), and "lack of assurance" (i.e., degree of confidence that the expert has in the evaluation) have statistically significant effects on consumers' product evaluations. In contrast, the "positive polarity" (i.e., the degree of positivity of an expert's evaluations) has an insignificant effect, while the "negative polarity" (i.e., the degree of negativity of an expert's evaluations) has a significant negative effect on consumers' product evaluations. Finally, the "social orientation" (i.e., the degree of how many social expressions experts include in their reviews) does not have a significant effect on consumers' product evaluations. In summary, the lexical properties of the product reviews were defined according to each relevant factor. Then, the influence of each linguistic factor of expert reviews on the consumers' final evaluations was tested. In addition, a test was performed on whether each linguistic factor influencing consumers' product evaluations differs depending on the lexical features. The results of these analyses should provide guidelines on how individuals process massive volumes of unstructured data depending on lexical features in various contexts and how companies can use this mechanism from their perspective. This paper provides several theoretical and practical contributions, such as the proposal of a new methodology and its application to real data.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.61-81
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• 2007

Recently, use of foreign models and foreign language in advertising is a general trend in Korea even though the effect has not been well-known..Most of the previous research shows rather an opposite effect claiming marketing communication is more effective when higher congruity between marketing communication and consumer's cultural values are achieved. However, the introduction of global culture due to the expansion of new media such as Internet or cable television makes the congruity not the best choice of marketing strategy. In addition, use of highly attractive models in advertising to increase the effect of advertising is general. However, recent studies show that targeted women audience tend to compare themselves to the highly attractive models and do experience negative sentiment. Bower (2001) proved the difference between 'comparer' and 'noncomparer' when women face highly attractive models. The results show that a comparer who has an intention to compare highly attractive model (HAM) with herself has a significantly negative effect on model expertise, product argument, product evaluation and buying intention. Therefore, HAM is not always a good choice and model attractiveness plays a role in the processing other cues or changing the advertising effect from result of processing other cues. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the use of foreign language on the advertising response of the audience with regard of the model attractiveness. For the empirical study, the virtual advertising using foreign models (HAM, NAM), brand names and slogans(Korean, English) were used as stimuli. The respondents of each stimulus were 75('HAM-Korean'), 75('NAM-Korean'), 66('HAM-English') and 66 ('NAM-English') respectively. To establish the effect of marketing communication, the attitude for media(AM), the attitude for product(AP), targetedness(TD), overall quality(OQ), and purchase intention(PI) with 7 point likert scale were measured. The manipulation was verified to check the difference between HAM attractiveness assessment (m=3.27) and NAM attractiveness assessment (m=5.12). The mean difference was statiscally significant (p<.05). As a result, all consequences were significantly changed with model attractiveness, and overall quality evaluation(OQ) were significantly changed with language. The interaction effect from model attractiveness and language was significant on attitude toward the product(AP) and purchase intention(PI). To analyze the difference, the mean values and standard deviation of consequences were compared. The result was more positive when model attractiveness was high for all consequences. For language effect, the assessment was more positive when English was used for OQ. Considering model attractiveness and language simultaneously, HAM-Korean was more positive for AP and PI, and NAM-English was more positive for AP and PI. In other words, the interaction effect was confirmed by model attractiveness and language. As mentioned above, use of foreign models and foreign language in advertising was explained by cultural match up hypothesis (Leclerc et al. 1994) which claimed that culture of origin effect. In other words, in advertising, use of same cultural language with the foreign model could make positive assessment for OQ. But this effect was moderated by model attractiveness. When the model attractiveness was low, the use of English makes PI high because of the effect of foreign language which supported the cultural match up hypothesis. When the model attractiveness was low, the use of Korean made AP and PI high because the effect of foreign language was diluted. It was a general notion that the visual cues got processed before (Holbrook and Moore, 1981; Sholl et al, 1995) compared to linguistic cues. Therefore, when consumers were faced HAM, so much perception was already consumed at processing visual cues making their native language of Korean to strongly and positively connected with the advertising concept. On the contrary, when consumers were faced with NAM, less perception was consumed compared to HAM, making English to accompany cultural halo effect which affected more positively. Therefore, when foreign models were employed in advertising, the language must be carefully selected according to the level of model attractiveness.

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.5 s.67
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• pp.203-212
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• 2006

With interests and participation in the costumeplay that mimics characters appeared on carton or animation in recent days, the costumeplay becomes one of cultural phenomena. Using a qualitative research method, this study identified costumeplayers' costume consumption pattern and explored its meanings from the perspective of consumption culture. Indeed, this study intended to help for understanding costumeplayer group as a consumer, and to provide basic knowledge about new market analysis related to fashion design and marketing. The results from the analyzing participant observation and in-depth interviews data are as follows: first, costumeplayers usually begin costumeplay by friends' invitations or by themselves and then continue on participating. Through the costumeplay, participants have benefits such as fun, departure from the daily life, and social interaction. Second, participants acquire costumes through purchase, rent, producing or combination of daily wear, but both purchase and rent account high. Third, the meanings of consumption culture in costumeplay include consumption behavior repeating possession and disposal. Also, costumeplayers concerns efficiency when purchasing or renting the costumes, and internet is a place where information search, comparison, and actual purchasing are occurred. Based on the results, fashion design and marketing implication, limitation of this study and further research ideas were suggested.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.97-117
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• 2012

Nowadays, Internet users tend to do a variety of actions at the same time such as web browsing, social networking and multimedia consumption. While watching a video, once a user is interested in any product, the user has to do information searches to get to know more about the product. With a conventional approach, user has to search it separately with search engines like Bing or Google, which might be inconvenient and time-consuming. For this reason, a video annotation platform has been developed in order to provide users more convenient and more interactive ways with video content. In the future of smart TV environment, users can follow annotated information, for example, a link to a vendor to buy the product of interest. It is even better to enable users to search for information by directly discussing with friends. Users can effectively get useful and relevant information about the product from friends who share common interests or might have experienced it before, which is more reliable than the results from search engines. Social networking services provide an appropriate environment for people to share products so that they can show new things to their friends and to share their personal experiences on any specific product. Meanwhile, they can also absorb the most relevant information about the product that they are interested in by either comments or discussion amongst friends. However, within a very huge graph of friends, determining the most appropriate persons to ask for information about a specific product has still a limitation within the existing conventional approach. Once users want to share or discuss a product, they simply share it to all friends as new feeds. This means a newly posted article is blindly spread to all friends without considering their background interests or knowledge. In this way, the number of responses back will be huge. Users cannot easily absorb the relevant and useful responses from friends, since they are from various fields of interest and knowledge. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a method to filter a user's friends for information search, which leverages semantic video annotation and social networking services. Our method filters and brings out who can give user useful information about a specific product. By examining the existing Facebook information regarding users and their social graph, we construct a user profile of product interest. With user's permission and authentication, user's particular activities are enriched with the domain-specific ontology such as GoodRelations and BestBuy Data sources. Besides, we assume that the object in the video is already annotated using Linked Data. Thus, the detail information of the product that user would like to ask for more information is retrieved via product URI. Our system calculates the similarities among them in order to identify the most suitable friends for seeking information about the mentioned product. The system filters a user's friends according to their score which tells the order of whom can highly likely give the user useful information about a specific product of interest. We have conducted an experiment with a group of respondents in order to verify and evaluate our system. First, the user profile accuracy evaluation is conducted to demonstrate how much our system constructed user profile of product interest represents user's interest correctly. Then, the evaluation on filtering method is made by inspecting the ranked results with human judgment. The results show that our method works effectively and efficiently in filtering. Our system fulfills user needs by supporting user to select appropriate friends for seeking useful information about a specific product that user is curious about. As a result, it helps to influence and convince user in purchase decisions.

• Journal of Korean Home Economics Education Association
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.35-52
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• 2023

This study investigated the utilization and satisfaction of lunchboxes according to food-related lifestyle. A sample of 819 adults who regularly purchased lunchboxes were studied. This study can provide basic data for effective menu development. The participants of the study were classified into 4 groups: a 'taste-seeking group', an 'economy-seeking group', 'a convenience-seeking group', and a 'health-seeking group'. The purchase price of lunchboxes was in the range of 3,500 to 4,000 won. The 'health-seeking group' was shown to spend the highest amount on lunchboxes, over 5,100 won. Information about lunchboxes was obtained primarily through convenience stores followed by Internet SNS (p<0.05). Most participants considered nutritional value when purchasing a lunchbox (p<0.001), of which protein, caloric, and sodium content were perceived as important. Moreover, lunchboxes with clean and hygienic aesthetics were preferred amongst the 'health-seeking group' (p<0.01). The 'economy-seeking group' had a higher satisfaction linked with taste (3.66) and quantity (3.60, p<0.001). Furthermore, in terms of the satisfaction with a menu variety the 'health-seeking group' showed the highest satisfaction with a score of 3.76, while the 'convenience-seeking group' ranked the lowest satisfaction with a score of 3.46 (p<0.05). All groups were satisfied with the convenience for purchasing lunchbox (p<0.001). Additionally, most participants preferred white rice (p<0.001) and meat (p<0.01) with cooked by fried and grilled. Lastly, in the content of the lunchbox use in the future, most participants indicated the intent for continuous use (p<0.01) and recommendation to others with the reason for the low price (19.2%) in the 'economy-seeking group', fresh ingredients (16.2%) in the 'convenience-seeking group', and nutritive (17.3%) in the 'health-seeking group', as well as for the convenience of purchase in the overall groups. Taken together, 'taste' and 'convenience' were the most important factors for all groups, while 'nutrition of food' and 'addition of condiments' scored relatively low on the satisfaction in all groups. Therefore, we recommend for the growth of the convenience store lunchbox market, that it is necessary to improve the quality of the lunchbox by developing various menus based on lifestyle group and fortifying nutrition.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.45-65
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• 2009

As a number of people using the internet for their shopping steadily rises, it is increasingly important for retailers to understand why consumers decide to buy products via online or offline. The main purpose of this study is to develop and test a model that enhance our understanding of how consumers respond future online and offline channels for their purchasing. Rather than merely adopting statistical models like most other studies in this field, the present study develops a model that combines double-cohort method with multinomial logit model. It is desirable if one can adopt an overall encompassing criterion in the study of consumer behaviors form diverse sales channels. This study uses the concept of cohort or aging to enable this comparison. It enables us to analyze how consumers respond to online and offline channels as people aged by measuring their shopping behavior for an online and offline retailers and their subsequent purchase intentions. Based on some empirical findings, this study concludes with policy implications and some necessary fields of future studies desirable.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.123-140
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• 2009

Collaborative filtering recommends products using customers' preferences, so it cannot recommend products to the new customer who has no preference information. This paper proposes a novel approach to new customer recommendations using the social network analysis which is used to search relationships among social entities such as genetics network, traffic network, organization network, etc. The proposed recommendation method identifies customers most likely to be neighbors to the new customer using the centrality theory in social network analysis and recommends products those customers have liked in the past. The procedure of our method is divided into four phases : purchase similarity analysis, social network construction, centrality-based neighborhood formation, and recommendation generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted several experiments using a data set from a department store in Korea. Our method was compared with the best-seller-based method that uses the best-seller list to generate recommendations for the new customer. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the best-seller-based method as measured by F1-measure.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.150-158
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• 2012

This study was conducted to investigate the relationship between knowledge of nutrition labeling and the effect on eating habits with 300 high school boys in Seoul. The subjects were divided into an underweight (UW) group (BMI < $18.5kg/m^2$, n = 42), a normal weight (NW) group ($18.5kg/m^2\;{\leq}\;BMI\;<\;23kg/m^2$, n = 129) and an overweight (OW) group (BMI ${\geq}\;23kg/m^2$, n = 79) based on their body mass index (BMI). The average age of participants was 17.8 years old and their mean height and weight were 174.9 cm and 66.5 kg. The mean BMI of subjects was $21.7kg/m^2$ which fell within the normal range. Seventy six point four percent of subjects perceived nutrition labeling and they acquired the information pertaining to it through TV and internet. The UW group and the OW group obtained it from their parents, relatives and friends, while NW group acquired it from school. There were significant differences among groups in the acquired source of the information on nutrition labeling (p < 0.05). The NW group and the OW group trusted nutrition labeling more than the UW group, but there were no significant differences among them. Forty five point five percent of the UW group and 40.7% the NW group were satisfied with nutrition labeling education, while only 15.8% of the OW group did it. The OW group checked nutrition labeling more than the UW group and the NW group at the point of food purchase. The primary reason for examining nutrition labeling was 'to check nutrient contents' in the UW group and the NW group, while the OW group examined it to improve health including regulation of body weight. There were significant differences among groups with regards to the reason for examining nutrition labeling (p < 0.001). The OW group was aware that nutrition labeling affected their eating ha-bits significantly more than the other groups (p < 0.05). Therefore, application-centered education on nutrition labeling and the strong support of the government is needed in order to improve nutrition labeling use and to apply the information from nutrition labeling into student dietary life.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.164-181
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• 2007

This paper empirically analyzes determinants of DTV (Digital Television) adoption in household survey data with IT-related household demand characteristics. To this purpose, we conducted a survey for the adoption of DTV to 1,000 households nationwide. In the questionnaire, various questions asking socio-economics characteristics such as age, education, income were included. Also, status of adoption and usage of IT services such as paid broadcasting, internet, and DVD were asked. To analyze the determinants of intention of purchasing, decision of purchasing, and the timing of purchasing DTV, we adopted the ordered logit, binary logit and multinomial legit models. When there is an order among groups, ordered logit was employed and when there is no orders among groups, multinomial logit was emplyed for the estimation. It is found that when conditions of other explanatory variable are constant, the more educated household heads are, the more probable they become early adopters of DTV. It is also found that other conditions being constant, the income level of households and IT-related household demand characteristics are very important factors affecting DTV adoption. Since the likelihood of purchasing DTV is much higher for those who know the government policy of analog broadcasting termination schedule than others who do not know, dissemination of the Korean government's digital broadcasting policy will affect significantly the adoption of DTV. And policy with various incentives ought to be employed to accelerate DTV adoption, because households with the older TV sets are more likely to purchase DTV. It is suggested that the Korean government should develop policy to connect both DBS (Direct Broadcast Satellite) and DTV since DBS subscribers are more likely to be an early adopter than non-subscribers.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.97-113
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• 2005

This paper designed and implemented(programmed) a comparative shopping agent that helps consumers to shop at on-line shopping malls over Internet. At offline stores, as consumers usually tell a sales clerk about a manufacturer, functions and price range of an item they want to purchase, the sales clerk will show the products or relevant catalogues. Then the consumer will compare functions, design and prices of the product and buy it with the lowest price. PriceMeter, a comparative shopping agent, introduced in this paper, is designed best geared to this consumers' buying behavior. Basically, as consumers enter a manufacturer's name, price, features and etc. at a search window, PriceMeter will search the web and provide a list of product informations such as features and prices that meet the search conditions. Consumers can see the information in either a form of catalogue or a printing format. As consumers click specific items to examine closely, it will show prices and information about shopping malls that sell the requested items. Clicking a 'Buy' icon, the consumers will be transferred to the right web page at the linked shopping mall. The emergence of the comparative shopping agent will expedite a consumer-centered retailing economy in the age of e-commerce. As consumers are provided with a better set of product and shopping mall information, they can make better purchasing decisions and gain more bargaining power shifted from manufacturers(sellers). The presentation of this comparative shopping agent is intended to promote the consumer-centered B2C e-commerce.