• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.105-130
• /
• 2008

Consumers of e-learning market differ from those of other markets in that they are replaced in a specific time scale. For example, e-learning contents aimed at highschool senior students cannot be consumed by a specific consumer over the designated period of time. Hence e-learning service providers need to attract new groups of students every year. Due to lack of information on products designed for continuously emerging consumers, the consumers face difficulties in making rational decisions in a short time period. Increased uncertainty of product purchase leads customers to herding behaviors to obtain information of the product from others and imitate them. Taking into consideration of these features of e-learning market, this study will focus on the online herding behavior in purchasing e-learning contents. There is no definite concept for e-learning. However, it is being discussed in a wide range of perspectives from educational engineering to management to e-business etc. Based upon the existing studies, we identify two main view-points regarding e-learning. The first defines e-learning as a concept that includes existing terminologies, such as CBT (Computer Based Training), WBT (Web Based Training), and IBT (Internet Based Training). In this view, e-learning utilizes IT in order to support professors and a part of or entire education systems. In the second perspective, e-learning is defined as the usage of Internet technology to deliver diverse intelligence and achievement enhancing solutions. In other words, only the educations that are done through the Internet and network can be classified as e-learning. We take the second definition of e-learning for our working definition. The main goal of this study is to investigate what factors affect consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents and to identify the differential impact of the factors between consumers with purchase experience and those without the experience. To accomplish the goal of this study, it focuses on herding behavior and perceived usefulness as antecedents to behavioral intention. The proposed research model in the study extends the Technology Acceptance Model by adding herding behavior and usability to take into account the unique characteristics of e-learning content market and e-learning systems use, respectively. The current study also includes consumer experience with e-learning content purchase because the previous experience is believed to affect purchasing intention when consumers buy experience goods or services. Previous studies on e-learning did not consider the characteristics of e-learning contents market and the differential impact of consumer experience on the relationship between the antecedents and behavioral intention, which is the target of this study. This study employs a survey method to empirically test the proposed research model. A survey questionnaire was developed and distributed to 629 informants. 528 responses were collected, which consist of potential customer group (n = 133) and experienced customer group (n = 395). The data were analyzed using PLS method, a structural equation modeling method. Overall, both herding behavior and perceived usefulness influence consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents. In detail, in the case of potential customer group, herding behavior has stronger effect on purchase intention than does perceived usefulness. However, in the case of shopping-experienced customer group, perceived usefulness has stronger effect than does herding behavior. In sum, the results of the analysis show that with regard to purchasing experience, perceived usefulness and herding behavior had differential effects upon the purchase of e-learning contents. As a follow-up analysis, the interaction effects of the number of purchase transaction and herding behavior/perceived usefulness on purchase intention were investigated. The results show that there are no interaction effects. This study contributes to the literature in a couple of ways. From a theoretical perspective, this study examined and showed evidence that the characteristics of e-learning market such as continuous renewal of consumers and thus high uncertainty and individual experiences are important factors to be considered when the purchase intention of e-learning content is studied. This study can be used as a basis for future studies on e-learning success. From a practical perspective, this study provides several important implications on what types of marketing strategies e-learning companies need to build. The bottom lines of these strategies include target group attraction, word-of-mouth management, enhancement of web site usability quality, etc. The limitations of this study are also discussed for future studies.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.23 no.3
• /
• pp.131-154
• /
• 2013

New internet technologies have created a revolutionary new platform which allows consumers to make decision about product price and quality quickly and provides information about themselves through the transcript of online reviews. By expressing their feelings toward products or services on virtual opinion platforms, users extend their influence into cyberspace as electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM). Existing research indicates that an impact of eWOM on the consumer decision process is influential. For both academic researchers and practitioners, investigating this phenomenon of information sharing in online website is essential given the increasing number of consumers using them as sources of purchase decisions. It is worthwhile to examine the extent to which opinion seekers are willing to accept and adopt online reviews and which factors encourage adoption. Discerning the most motivating aspects of information adoption in particular, could help electronic marketers better promote their brand and presence on the internet. The objectives of this study are to investigate how online WOM influences a persons' purchase decision by discovering which factors encourage information adoption. Especially focused on the self-efficacy, this research investigates how self-efficacy affects on information usefulness and adoption of online information. Although people are exposed to same review or comment about product or service, some accept the reviews while others do not. We notice that accepting online reviews mainly depends on the person's preference or personal characteristics. This study empirically examines this issue by using cognitive dissonance theory. Specifically, in the movie industry, we address few questions-is always positive WOM generating positive effect? What if the movie isn't the person's favorite genre? What if the person who is very self-assertive so doesn't take other's opinion easily? In these cases of cognitive dissonance, is always WOM generating same result? While many studies have focused on one direct of WOM which indicates positive (or negative) informative reviews or comments generate positive (or negative) results and more (or less) profits, this study investigates not only directional properties of WOM but also how people change their opinion towards product or service positive to negative, negative to positive through the online WOM. An experiment was conducted quantitatively by using a sample of 168 users who have experience within the online movie review site, 'Naver Movie'. Users were required to complete a survey regarding reviews and comments taken from the real movie page. The data reflected user's perceptions of online WOM information that determined users' adoption level. Analysis results provide empirical support for the proposed theoretical perspective. When user can't agree with the opinion of online WOM information, in other words, when cognitive dissonance between online WOM information and users' preference occurs, perceived self-efficacy significantly decreases customers' perception of usefulness. And this perception of usefulness plays an important role in determining users' intention to adopt online WOM information. Most of researches have been concentrated on characteristics of online WOM itself such as quality or vividness of information, credibility of source and direction of online WOM, etc. for describing effect of online WOM, but our results suggest that users' personal character (e.g., self-efficacy) plays decisive role for acceptance of online WOM information. Higher self-efficacy means lower possibility to accept the information that represents counter opinion because of cognitive dissonance, whereas the people that have lower self-efficacy are willing to accept the online WOM information as true and refer to purchase decision. This study suggests a model for understanding role of direction of online WOM information. Also, our result implicates the importance of online review supervision and personalized information service by confirming switching opinion negative to positive is more difficult than positive to negative through the online WOM information. This implication would help marketers to manage online reviews of their products or services.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
• /
• v.23 no.2
• /
• pp.3-29
• /
• 2008

The volume of air passengers and cargo transportation has increased rapidly in recent years. This trend will be even more noticeable as the high-tech service industry expands and the globalization progresses. In an effort to reflect and to cope with this trend, many conventions concerning international air transportation have been concluded. The Republic of Korea has also acceded to the Montreal Convention of 1999 on September 20th, 2007 which became effective on December 29th 2007. However, Korea currently does not provide any private law on the liability of domestic air carrier, leaving the regulation wholly to the general conditions of carriage of private air lines. These general conditions of carriage, however, are not sufficient to regulate the liabilities of domestic air carriers, because they cannot be fully recognized as a legitimate source of law applicable in the court. This situation is inconvenient for both air carrier and their customers. Thus, the Ministry of Justice of Korea has decided to enact a law that will regulate domestic air transportation, namely, "Domestic Carriage by Air Act", as a part of the Korean Commercial Code. So was composed a special committee for legislation of the Domestic Carriage by Air Act. This writer has led the committee as a chairman. The committee has held in total 10 meetings so far and has completed a draft bill for the part VI of the Korean Commercial Code, "Air Carriage." The essentials of the draft are as follows: First, the establishment of Part VI in the Commercial Code. The Korean Commercial Code already includes a series of provisions on road transportation in part II and carriage by sea in part V. In addition to these rules regulating different types of transportation, the Domestic Carriage by Air Act will newly establish part VI to regulate air carriages. Eventually, the Commercial Code will provide an integrated legal system on the transportation industry. Second, the acceptance of the basic liability system which major international conventions, such as Montreal Convention of 1999 and Guadalajara Convention of 1961, have adopted. This is very important, because the law of air carriage is unified worldwide through various international conventions, making it necessary and significant for the new act to achieve conformity between rules of international air carriage and that of domestic air carriage. Third, the acceptance of Rome Convention system on damage caused by foreign aircraft to third parties on the surface. Fourth, the application of rules on domestic road carriage or carriage by sea mutatis mutandis with necessary modifications. This very point is the merit of inserting domestic air transportation law into the Commercial Code. By doing so, the number of articles can be reduced and the rules on air carriage can conform to that of road transportation and carriage by sea. The bill is expected to be passed by the parliament at the end of this year and is expected to be effective by end of July 2009.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.99-120
• /
• 2010

Due to the wide spread of customers' frequent access of non face-to-face services, there have been many attempts to improve customer satisfaction using huge amounts of data accumulated throughnon face-to-face channels. Usually, a call center is regarded to be one of the most representative non-faced channels. Therefore, it is important that a call center has enough agents to offer high level customer satisfaction. However, managing too many agents would increase the operational costs of a call center by increasing labor costs. Therefore, predicting and calculating the appropriate size of human resources of a call center is one of the most critical success factors of call center management. For this reason, most call centers are currently establishing a department of WFM(Work Force Management) to estimate the appropriate number of agents and to direct much effort to predict the volume of inbound calls. In real world applications, inbound call prediction is usually performed based on the intuition and experience of a domain expert. In other words, a domain expert usually predicts the volume of calls by calculating the average call of some periods and adjusting the average according tohis/her subjective estimation. However, this kind of approach has radical limitations in that the result of prediction might be strongly affected by the expert's personal experience and competence. It is often the case that a domain expert may predict inbound calls quite differently from anotherif the two experts have mutually different opinions on selecting influential variables and priorities among the variables. Moreover, it is almost impossible to logically clarify the process of expert's subjective prediction. Currently, to overcome the limitations of subjective call prediction, most call centers are adopting a WFMS(Workforce Management System) package in which expert's best practices are systemized. With WFMS, a user can predict the volume of calls by calculating the average call of each day of the week, excluding some eventful days. However, WFMS costs too much capital during the early stage of system establishment. Moreover, it is hard to reflect new information ontothe system when some factors affecting the amount of calls have been changed. In this paper, we attempt to devise a new model for predicting inbound calls that is not only based on theoretical background but also easily applicable to real world applications. Our model was mainly developed by the interactive decision tree technique, one of the most popular techniques in data mining. Therefore, we expect that our model can predict inbound calls automatically based on historical data, and it can utilize expert's domain knowledge during the process of tree construction. To analyze the accuracy of our model, we performed intensive experiments on a real case of one of the largest car insurance companies in Korea. In the case study, the prediction accuracy of the devised two models and traditional WFMS are analyzed with respect to the various error rates allowable. The experiments reveal that our data mining-based two models outperform WFMS in terms of predicting the amount of accident calls and fault calls in most experimental situations examined.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
• /
• v.5 no.2
• /
• pp.47-117
• /
• 1999

This study concern with the pattern of Pusan Station shopping district within Pusan City, Korea, one of the special functioned shopping district within Pusan City. This paper will serve as a part of series studies which attempt to clarify the internal structure of Pusan as a whole. Part(II) of this study deals with the functions including living related, restaurants and others. The pattern of floors, size of shops, street corners and widths of streets were also analysed. The results are as follows: 1. In terms of numbers of firms in living related function, Pusan Station shopping district is the $7{\sim}8th$ ranked central place among nine the highest centers within Pusan City. Pusan Station shopping district has not much promoted vertical spatial differentiation comparatively, and also it's intensity of land use is the lower among nine the highest centers. It is presented that intimate relationship between intensity of vertical land use and classes of central places within the city. The ratio of inns and hotels in Pusan Station shopping district is third ranked in Pusan City. And the size of inns and hotels in this area is the most largest among the nine highest ranked central places within Pusan City. These presented that the traditional characteristics of station area as a special functioned shopping district. Inns and hotels mainly located along the narrower and back street. And it forms agglomerated areas or 'an alley of inns' at the inner parts of blocks, some like a 'hidden flower'. In Korea, 'alley' means that an area of specialization gains the prestige, traditionally. 2. Restaurants mainly locate along the narrower and back streets. And agglomerated areas of restaurants coincide with the agglomerated area of drinking places. It shows that these two kinds of functions need the same locational conditions. The ratio of Chinese restaurants is the highest in the Pusan Station shopping district. It's due to the agglomerated area these kinds of restaurants at the 'China town'. 3. Pusan Station shopping district has been formed along the streets within the residential areas. It's means that this shopping district now at the initial or middle growth era in development stage of shopping areas. 4. In general, wholesales and light manufacturing are located at peripheries within shopping district. But in Pusan Station shopping district, it dose not appear these spatial pattern. It shows that this area is lower ranked central place and not much progressed in spatial differentiation. 5. Particular firms which customers and workers have stayed more longer period of time are located at the far from the first floor. This vertical spatial differentiation is similar to the horizontal sequences. 6. Firms which have more ability of rental payment are located at street comers such as banks and pharmacies. In Pusan Station shopping district commercial facilities could not invade into the second third floors at narrower streets and first floor of back streets, still now.

• Proceedings of the Korean Reliability Society Conference
• /
• 2001.06a
• /
• pp.277-278
• /
• 2001

The successful operation of a product In service depends upon the effective provision of logistic support in order to achieve and maintain the required levels of performance and customer satisfaction. Logistic support encompasses the activities and facilities required to maintain a product (hardware and software) in service. Logistic support covers maintenance, manpower and personnel, training, spares, technical documentation and packaging handling, storage and transportation and support facilities.The cost of logistic support is often a major contributor to the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of a product and increasingly customers are making purchase decisions based on lifecycle cost rather than initial purchase price alone. Logistic support considerations can therefore have a major impact on product sales by ensuring that the product can be easily maintained at a reasonable cost and that all the necessary facilities have been provided to fully support the product in the field so that it meets the required availability. Quantification of support costs allows the manufacturer to estimate the support cost elements and evaluate possible warranty costs. This reduces risk and allows support costs to be set at competitive rates.Integrated Logistic Support (ILS) is a management method by which all the logistic support services required by a customer can be brought together in a structured way and In harmony with a product. In essence the application of ILS:- causes logistic support considerations to be integrated into product design;- develops logistic support arrangements that are consistently related to the design and to each other;- provides the necessary logistic support at the beginning and during customer use at optimum cost.The method by which ILS achieves much of the above is through the application of Logistic Support Analysis (LSA). This is a series of support analysis tasks that are performed throughout the design process in order to ensure that the product can be supported efficiently In accordance with the requirements of the customer.The successful application of ILS will result in a number of customer and supplier benefits. These should include some or all of the following:- greater product uptime;- fewer product modifications due to supportability deficiencies and hence less supplier rework;- better adherence to production schedules in process plants through reduced maintenance, better support;- lower supplier product costs;- Bower customer support costs;- better visibility of support costs;- reduced product LCC;- a better and more saleable product;- Improved safety;- increased overall customer satisfaction;- increased product purchases;- potential for purchase or upgrade of the product sooner through customer savings on support of current product.ILS should be an integral part of the total management process with an on-going improvement activity using monitoring of achieved performance to tailor existing support and influence future design activities. For many years, ILS was predominantly applied to military procurement, primarily using standards generated by the US Government Department of Defense (DoD). The military standards refer to specialized government infrastructures and are too complex for commercial application. The methods and benefits of ILS, however, have potential for much wider application in commercial and civilian use. The concept of ILS is simple and depends on a structured procedure that assures that logistic aspects are fully considered throughout the design and development phases of a product, in close cooperation with the designers. The ability to effectively support the product is given equal weight to performance and is fully considered in relation to its cost.The application of ILS provides improvements in availability, maintenance support and longterm 3ogistic cost savings. Logistic costs are significant through the life of a system and can often amount to many times the initial purchase cost of the system.This study provides guidance on the minimum activities necessary to Implement effective ILS for a wide range of commercial suppliers. The guide supplements IEC60106-4, Guide on maintainability of equipment Part 4: Section Eight maintenance and maintenance support planning, which emphasizes the maintenance aspects of the support requirements and refers to other existing standards where appropriate. The use of Reliability and Maintainability studies is also mentioned in this study, as R&M is an important interface area to ILS.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.20 no.2
• /
• pp.123-136
• /
• 2014

Recently, online shopping has further developed as the use of the Internet and a variety of smart mobile devices becomes more prevalent. The increase in the scale of such shopping has led to the creation of many Internet shopping malls. Consequently, there is a tendency for increasingly fierce competition among online retailers, and as a result, many Internet shopping malls are making significant attempts to attract online users to their sites. One such attempt is keyword marketing, whereby a retail site pays a fee to expose its link to potential customers when they insert a specific keyword on an Internet portal site. The price related to each keyword is generally estimated by the keyword's frequency of appearance. However, it is widely accepted that the price of keywords cannot be based solely on their frequency because many keywords may appear frequently but have little relationship to shopping. This implies that it is unreasonable for an online shopping mall to spend a great deal on some keywords simply because people frequently use them. Therefore, from the perspective of shopping malls, a specialized process is required to extract meaningful keywords. Further, the demand for automating this extraction process is increasing because of the drive to improve online sales performance. In this study, we propose a methodology that can automatically extract only shopping-related keywords from the entire set of search keywords used on portal sites. We define a shopping-related keyword as a keyword that is used directly before shopping behaviors. In other words, only search keywords that direct the search results page to shopping-related pages are extracted from among the entire set of search keywords. A comparison is then made between the extracted keywords' rankings and the rankings of the entire set of search keywords. Two types of data are used in our study's experiment: web browsing history from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013, and site information. The experimental dataset was from a web site ranking site, and the biggest portal site in Korea. The original sample dataset contains 150 million transaction logs. First, portal sites are selected, and search keywords in those sites are extracted. Search keywords can be easily extracted by simple parsing. The extracted keywords are ranked according to their frequency. The experiment uses approximately 3.9 million search results from Korea's largest search portal site. As a result, a total of 344,822 search keywords were extracted. Next, by using web browsing history and site information, the shopping-related keywords were taken from the entire set of search keywords. As a result, we obtained 4,709 shopping-related keywords. For performance evaluation, we compared the hit ratios of all the search keywords with the shopping-related keywords. To achieve this, we extracted 80,298 search keywords from several Internet shopping malls and then chose the top 1,000 keywords as a set of true shopping keywords. We measured precision, recall, and F-scores of the entire amount of keywords and the shopping-related keywords. The F-Score was formulated by calculating the harmonic mean of precision and recall. The precision, recall, and F-score of shopping-related keywords derived by the proposed methodology were revealed to be higher than those of the entire number of keywords. This study proposes a scheme that is able to obtain shopping-related keywords in a relatively simple manner. We could easily extract shopping-related keywords simply by examining transactions whose next visit is a shopping mall. The resultant shopping-related keyword set is expected to be a useful asset for many shopping malls that participate in keyword marketing. Moreover, the proposed methodology can be easily applied to the construction of special area-related keywords as well as shopping-related ones.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.25-75
• /
• 1999

This study concern with the pattern of Pusan Station Shopping District within Pusan City, Korea, one of the third ranked centers within Pusan-the first ranked is CBD, the second is subCBD, the third are Spa Shopping district, Tongnae shopping district, Jobang-Ap shopping district and Yangjeong shopping district. This paper serves as a part of series studies which attempt to clarify the internal structure of Pusan as a whole. Part(I) of this study deals with the pattern of functions including information & culture, business, recreation and retailing. The results are as follows. 1. Pusan Station is one of higher ranked class of central places within Pusan City. But the ratio of dwelling houses is the highest in Pusan Station among the 9 higher ranked central places within Pusan. It means that the residential areas still remain along the maze type of narrower streets inner part of the blocks, especially western belt of this shopping district. 2. Business functions are one of the important criteria which classified the central places within the city and Pusan Station is the first ranked shopping districts in terms of these criteria among the 9 higher ranked central places including CBD within Pusan City. It suggests that Pusan Station is the miniature of the CBD, SubCBD is not the miniature of CBD in the view point of business function. It also means that Pusan Station Shopping District has been developed as a special shopping district or as a special central place. It has not been evolved as a center of the hierarchy of central places within the city by the natural or organic growth. 3. Pusan Station as 'the third space or drinking place' and it's characteristics as a amusement center presents at so called the 'Texas Town'-free tax area- whose customers are mainly U. S. soldiers and foreign sailors. But from the 1990s, this 'Town' changed to 'Russian Town', You can easy to meet many Russians and Russian lettered signboards-not English- along the street. 4. Convenient stores distribute mainly at back streets or along the narrower streets. It means that this kinds of stores have a residential oriented character. And a certain convenient stores locate with almost same distances. It suggests that it's hinterland is limited in nearer neighborhoods.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.195-204
• /
• 2008

With the growth of airline management, as well as computer and IT security, the international trade in this modern society has been rapidly increasing, Along with the advancing, airplanes have become a universal means of communication. However, the complications associated with airplane safety have also been brought up as a result, the most concerning of which is terrorism. One of the main counterplans for preventing terrorism is Ground security activities the core of Ground security activities is absolute safety for passengers in both passenger terminal and freight terminal. Subastral security refers to physical protection, proximity control and 100% security search and freight guarding of the passengers' possessions, and the personnel's duties to perform such jobs are be! coming more crucial. On the other hand, Airport security check has bee n gradually developing since the 1960's, when hijacking began to take place. Although the airports have been providing more safe and comfortable services to their customers, terrorism is still happening today. When Ground security activities is minute, the users feel displeasure and discomfort, yet considering solely their convenience can brings problems in achieving safety. Since the 9.11 terror in 2001, the idea of improving and strengthening airport security was reinforced and a considerable amount of estate is being spent today for invention and application of new technology. Various nations, including the United States, have been improving their systems of security through public services; public police department is actively carrying out their duties in airports as well. In San Francisco International Airport, private police department is in charge of collection of data, national events, VIP protection, law enforcement, cooperation within facilities, daily-based patrol and traffic control. Under guidance and supervision of national organizations, such as TSA, general police department interprets X-Rays, operates metal detectors, checks passports or IDs and observes reactions to explosives. Under these circumstances, studies about advancement of cooperation and duties of general police department and private police department necessitated: especially about private police department and their training for searching equipments, decrease in number of turn over rate, invention of technology and prior settlement in estate for security. The privacy of the public, who make up the major population of airport passengers, must also be minimized. In the following research, the activities of police departments in San Francisco International Airport will be analyzed in order to understand recent actions of the United States on airport security.

• Korean Journal of Labor Studies
• /
• v.24 no.1
• /
• pp.107-156
• /
• 2018

This article examines the history of the in - house subcontracting and the stabilization of labor - management relations in the steel industry in Japan. The ratio of in-house subcontract workers among steel workers has increased steadily until the mid-2000s, and about 70% in case of the largest company. In-house subcontracting was used as a strategy of the company to increase the quantity flexibility of employment and to save labor costs. The in-house subcontracting company needed company-specialized skills, and the internal labor market was formed because the rate of full-time workers was high and the turnover rate was low. The in-house subcontractor introduced long-term business relationship with the steel factory by introducing the equipment and materials necessary for the performance of the work, and the factory implemented the productivity improvement policy of the in-house subcontractor, and the win-win relationship between the factory and in-house subcontractor was developed. The trade union did not oppose the idea that the expansion of in-house subcontracting contributed to corporate profits, the stability of employment of the members and maintenance of their working conditions. Since 2000, the steel factory has pursued the transformation of in - house subcontractors into subsidiaries, which has been supported by capital relations. By the way, since the mid-2000s, there has been an increase in the number of regular workers' employment. The major factors are as follows: more strengthened compliance with laws and regulations, the higher quality request of customers, stricter keeping of deadlines, and problem in recruiting of workers at in-house subcontract companies. The wage gap between the factory and in - house subcontracting was less at company B than at company S, and the wage level of in - house subcontracting was about 90% of the factory at company B. The relatively small gap at company B seems to be due to the union's movement of narrowing the gap, low market dominance and unfavorable labor market. The internal labor market has been formed in the in-house subcontracting, and the wage gap is not large, and the possibility of labor disputes is low. Industrial relations are stable in the in-house subcontract company as well as the factory. The stabilization of labor-management relations in the steel industry in Korea is required to reduce the wage gap between the factory and in-house subcontract enterprises by raising productivity and expanding the internal labor market at in-house subcontract enterprises.