• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.65-88
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• 2008

Since the implementation of economic reforms in 1978, the Chinese economy grows rapidly at an average annul growth rate of 9% over the post two decades. Franchising has been widely recognized as an important source of entrepreneurial activity. Trust is important in that it facilitates relational exchanges by permits partners to transcend short-run inequities or risks to concentrate on long-term profits or gains. In the relationship between the franchisors and franchisees, trust has been described as an important source of competitive advantage. However, little research has been done on the factors affecting trust in Chinese franchisor-franchisee relationships. The purpose of this study is to investigate what factors affect the trust in the franchise system in China, and to provide guidelines and insights to franchisors which enter Chinese market. In this study, according to Morgan and Hunt (1994), trust is defined as the extending when one party has confidence in an exchange partner's reliability and integrity. We offered a conceptual model of the empirical study. The model shows that the factors affecting the trust include franchisor's supports, communication, satisfaction with previous outcome and conflict. We also suggested the franchisor's supports and communication like to enhance the franchisee's satisfaction with previous outcome, and the franchisor's supports, communication and he franchisee's satisfaction with previous outcome tend to decrease conflict. Before the formal study, a pretest involving exploratory interviews with owners from three franchisees was conducted to make sure the questionnaire was relevant and clear to the respondents. The data were collected using trained interviewers to carry out personal interviews with the aid of an unidentified, muti-page, structured questionnaire. The respondents comprised of owners, managers, and owner managers of franchisee-owned food service franchises located in Beijing, China. Even though a total of 256 potential franchises were initially contacted, the finally usable sample consisted of 125 respondents. As expected, the sampling method was successful in soliciting respondents with waried personal and firm characteristics. Self-administrated questionnaires were used for all measures. And established scales were used to measure the latent constructs in this study. The measures tapped the franchisees' perceptions of the relationship with the referent franchisor. Five-point Likert-type scales ranging from "strongly disagree" (=1) to "strongly agree" (=7) were used throughout the constructs (trust, eight items; support, five items; communication, four items; satisfaction, six items; conflict, three items). The reliability measurements traditionally employed, such as the Cronbach's alpha, were used. All the reliabilities were greater than.80. The proposed measurement model was estimated using SPSS 12.0 and AMOS 5.0 analysis package. We conducted A series of exploratory factor analyses and confirmatory factor analyses to assess the convergent validity, discriminant validity, and reliability. The results indicate reasonable overall fits between the model and the observed data. The overall fit of measurement model were $X^2$= 159.699, p=0.004, d.f. = 116, GFI =.879, NFI =.898, CFI =.969, IFI =.970, TLI =.959, RMR =.058. The results demonstrated that the data reasonably fitted the model. We also examined construct reliability and reliability and average variance extracted (AVE). The construct reliability of each construct was greater than.80 and the AVE of each construct was greater than.50. According to the analysis of Structure Equation Modeling (SEM), the results of path model indicated an adequate fit of the model: $X^2$= 142.126, p = 0.044, d.f. = 115, GFI =.892, NFI =.909, CFI =.981, IFI =.981, TLI =.974, RMR =.057. As hypothesized, the results showed that it is strategically important to establish trust in a franchise system, and the franchisor's supports, communication and satisfaction with previous outcome tend to reinforce franchisee's trust. The results also showed trust seems to decrease as the experience of conflict episodes increases. And we also noticed that franchisor's supports and communication tend to enhance the franchisee's satisfaction with previous outcome, and communication tend to decrease conflict. If the trust between the franchisor and franchisee can be established in a franchise system, franchising offers many benefits and reduces many costs. To manage a mutual trust of relationship with their franchisees, franchisor's should provide support effectively to their franchisees. Effective assistant services have direct effect on franchisees' satisfaction with previous outcome and trust in franchisor. Especially, franchise sales process, orientation, and training in the start-up period are key elements for success of the franchise system. Franchisor's support is an accumulated separate satisfaction evaluation with different kind of service provided by the franchisor. And providing support definitely can improve the trustworthy image of the franchisor. In the franchise system, conflicts of interests and exertions of different power sources are very common. The experience of conflict episodes seems to negatively relate to trust. Therefore, it is important to reduce the negative side of the relationship conflicts. Communication actually plays a broader role in reducing conflict and establish mutual trust in franchisor-franchisee relationship. And effective communication between franchisors and franchisees can improve franchisees' satisfaction toward the franchise system. As the diversification of Chinese markets, both franchisors and franchisees must keep the relevant, timely, and reliable communication. And it is very important to improve the quality of communication. Satisfaction with precious outcomes seems to positively relate to trust. Franchisors and franchisees that are highly satisfied with the previous outcomes that flow from their relationship will perceive their partner as advancing their goal achievement. Therefore, it is necessary for both franchisor and their franchisees to make the welfare of partner with effort. Little literature has focused on what factors affect the trust between franchisors and their franchisees in China. This study developed the hypotheses regarding the factors affecting trust in the transaction relationship. The results of data analysis supported the hypotheses strongly. There are certain limitations in this study. First, we may point out that some other factors missed in this study could be significantly important. Second, the context of this study, food service industry, limits its potential generalizability for all franchise systems. More studies in different categories of franchise system are needed to broaden its generalizability. Third, the model was tested empirically in a sample in Beijing, more empirical tests of the proposed model in other Chinese areas are needed. Finally, the analysis in this study was solely based on the perception of franchisees and the opinions of franchisors were not included.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.111-136
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• 2018

In this paper, we propose a methodology to extract answer information about queries from various types of unstructured documents collected from multi-sources existing on web in order to expand knowledge base. The proposed methodology is divided into the following steps. 1) Collect relevant documents from Wikipedia, Naver encyclopedia, and Naver news sources for "subject-predicate" separated queries and classify the proper documents. 2) Determine whether the sentence is suitable for extracting information and derive the confidence. 3) Based on the predicate feature, extract the information in the proper sentence and derive the overall confidence of the information extraction result. In order to evaluate the performance of the information extraction system, we selected 400 queries from the artificial intelligence speaker of SK-Telecom. Compared with the baseline model, it is confirmed that it shows higher performance index than the existing model. The contribution of this study is that we develop a sequence tagging model based on bi-directional LSTM-CRF using the predicate feature of the query, with this we developed a robust model that can maintain high recall performance even in various types of unstructured documents collected from multiple sources. The problem of information extraction for knowledge base extension should take into account heterogeneous characteristics of source-specific document types. The proposed methodology proved to extract information effectively from various types of unstructured documents compared to the baseline model. There is a limitation in previous research that the performance is poor when extracting information about the document type that is different from the training data. In addition, this study can prevent unnecessary information extraction attempts from the documents that do not include the answer information through the process for predicting the suitability of information extraction of documents and sentences before the information extraction step. It is meaningful that we provided a method that precision performance can be maintained even in actual web environment. The information extraction problem for the knowledge base expansion has the characteristic that it can not guarantee whether the document includes the correct answer because it is aimed at the unstructured document existing in the real web. When the question answering is performed on a real web, previous machine reading comprehension studies has a limitation that it shows a low level of precision because it frequently attempts to extract an answer even in a document in which there is no correct answer. The policy that predicts the suitability of document and sentence information extraction is meaningful in that it contributes to maintaining the performance of information extraction even in real web environment. The limitations of this study and future research directions are as follows. First, it is a problem related to data preprocessing. In this study, the unit of knowledge extraction is classified through the morphological analysis based on the open source Konlpy python package, and the information extraction result can be improperly performed because morphological analysis is not performed properly. To enhance the performance of information extraction results, it is necessary to develop an advanced morpheme analyzer. Second, it is a problem of entity ambiguity. The information extraction system of this study can not distinguish the same name that has different intention. If several people with the same name appear in the news, the system may not extract information about the intended query. In future research, it is necessary to take measures to identify the person with the same name. Third, it is a problem of evaluation query data. In this study, we selected 400 of user queries collected from SK Telecom 's interactive artificial intelligent speaker to evaluate the performance of the information extraction system. n this study, we developed evaluation data set using 800 documents (400 questions * 7 articles per question (1 Wikipedia, 3 Naver encyclopedia, 3 Naver news) by judging whether a correct answer is included or not. To ensure the external validity of the study, it is desirable to use more queries to determine the performance of the system. This is a costly activity that must be done manually. Future research needs to evaluate the system for more queries. It is also necessary to develop a Korean benchmark data set of information extraction system for queries from multi-source web documents to build an environment that can evaluate the results more objectively.