• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.55-75
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• 1992

At the outset of import liberalization, most economists expected a significant drop in the prices of domestic goods that faced foreign competition. However, it is now generally acknowledge that a significant drop in prices of those goods has not occurred. A common claim is that the prices did not drop significantly because the major importers of many imported goods were also the domestic producers of competing goods. The objective of this paper is to analyze the welfare effect of importation by domestic firms that produce competing goods, to identify the factors that facilitate such business practices, and to formulate a policy that could improve the welfare. We proved that importation by competing domestic firms definitely raises the prices of both imported and domestic goods compared to the situation where foreign goods are imported by non-producers, ceteris paribus. The intuition behind this result is that since a producer-importer is essentially a cartel, its overall profit maximization requires reduced competition between the products that it sells. On the other hand, if a producer-importer is more efficient at distrinbution than a simple importer, the comparison between the two cases is a priori indeterminate. We also find that the industries in which domestic producers are actively involved in importing competing goods are the ones in which the distribution channels are tightly controlled by importer-producers. This finding suggests that exclusive dealing contracts, which work as an entry barrier, may be the source of importing by domestic producers. We argue that in a country such as Korea, where financial market is highly incomplete, tight control of the distribution channels by oligopolistic manufacturers is likely to be an effective entry barrier that leads to importing by domestic producers of similar goods. We further argue that seemingly superior distribution costs of importer-producers is likely to be a result of market foreclosure which would disappear once the entry barrier of exclusive dealing contracts is removed. Above findings suggest that market imperfections are the source of importation by domestic competitors, which in turn constitutes a market imperfection in itself and reduces consumer welfare. As potential remedies, we considered three alternatives; direct price control by the government over the imported goods sold by major domestic producers, regulation of trade itself between major producers, and regulation of exclusive dealing contracts. For reasons both theoretical and pratical, we find that the last alternative is the most attrative. Prohibiting exclusive contracts between manufacturers and dealers in industries where exclusive dealing contracts are a significant entry barrier is expected to break up the importer-producer cartel and improve the welfare.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.167-184
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• 2017

In this study, we investigated the effect of offline banking trust on smart banking trust. As influencing factors of smart banking trust, this study compared offline banking trust, smart banking's system quality, and information quality. For the empirical study, 186 questionnaire data were collected from smart banking users and the data were analyzed using Smart-PLS 2.0. As results, it was verified that there is trust transfer in FinTech service, by the significant effect of offline banking trust on smart banking trust. And it was proved that the effect of offline banking trust on smart banking trust is lower than that of smart banking itself. The contribution of this study can be seen in both academic and industrial aspects. First, it is the contribution of the academic aspect. Previous studies on banking were focused on either offline banking or smart banking. But this study, focus on the relationship between offline banking and online banking, proved that offline banking trust affects smart banking trust. Next, it is the industrial contribution. This study showed that offline banking characteristics of traditional commercial banks affect the trust of emerging smart banking service. This means that the emerging FinTech companies are not advantageous in the competition of trust building compared to traditional commercial banks. Unlike traditional commercial banks, the emerging FinTech is innovating the convenience of customers by arming them with new technologies such as mobile Internet, social network, cloud technology, and big data. However, these FinTech strengths alone can not guarantee sufficient trust needed for financial transactions, because banking customers do not change a habit or an inertia that they already have during using traditional banks. Therefore, emerging FinTech companies should strive to create destructive value that reflects the connection with various Internet services and the strength of online interaction such as social services, which have an advantage over customer contacts. And emerging FinTech companies should strive to build service trust, focused on young people with low resistance to new services.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.51-79
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• 2011

Korea has accomplished the establishment of the National Single Window for Paperless Trade. Since 1991, it has developed Trade Automation Service System based on EDI technology. In 2003, Korean government and private sectors jointly began to set up National Paperless Trade Service( e-Trade Service) as one of the e-government projects. In 2008, they commenced the uTradeHub Service which was equipped with Internet based e-B/L and e-Nego service systems for the first time in the world To facilitate the service Korea amended its e-Trade facilitation Act and Law by 2007. At the end of 2011, Korea historically recorded its trade volume of 1 trillion US dollars and joined '$1 trillion trade club' as the 9the member country since the country had started international trade less than five decades ago. A rolling out of the e-B/L and e-Nego service will 'ally reduce the transaction costs of trading businesses and accelerate the activation e-trade services. The purposes of the study are to examine 'e-B/L Korea' service and its facilitation strategies as well as identify obstacles to utilize the 'e-B/L Korea' service. The paper reviewed and analyzed Korea's Paperless trade system and distinctive characteristics of the 'e-B/L Korea Service. Parts of the fOWld distinctive characteristics of the Korea's e-B/L service are as follows; It is well equiped with IT and legal system. It also has more that 30,000 potential users who are already uTradeHub service users. The paper indicated several weaknesses of the current system such as global KPI issues, circulation of the electronic documents not only in the domestic market but also among economies, development of the electronic Bill of Exchange. As resolution measures, the paper recommended the introduction of mutual recognition system of PKI among trade partner counties, setting up e-trade solution for small and medium companies, and special attention to raise users' awareness of the e-B/L service.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.22
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• pp.131-166
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• 2003

The opening of advertising market and introduction of the free competition doctrine make the competition harsher among advertising agencies. Advertising agencies do their best to execute their ad more efficiently and scientifically. But, it is the reality that broadcasting advertising industry in korea did not construct enough infrastructure to execute the systematic activities compared with that of advanced countries. So, we need to grasp the present conditions and draw a time-table to construct primarily necessary infrastructures. In case of hardware infrastructure in advertising industry, digitalization of broadcasting and convergence of broadcasting with telecommunication make it hurry to construct that. But as the ad agencies was in the situation to compete each other, they have a difficulty to construct common hardware infrastructure enthusiastically. Thus, it is necessary to build hardware infrastructure in advertising industry for policy. And the construction of that should be executed systematically not for the short term effects but for the long term objectives. Also, it is the most important to construct reliable Software infrastructure in advertising industry from all of ad agencies. In these days, ad agencies have a tendency not to believe the important information, like the data of ratings and advertising transaction information, in relation to the advertising activities. And they do not share and communicate about the information of the advertising industry trends, research trends, advertisement related information. So, it is also hurry to build the on-line and off-line database system. Finally, for the development of brainware infrastructure in advertising industry, it is the most necessary to activate the cooperation relation between university and advertising agencies. Universities need to invite experts in the advertising to teach the students practical knowledge and ad agencies to recruit students who want to develop their carrier in the advertising industries. In conclusion, advertising industry in korea to solve these tasks for the development of advertising industry infrastructure in the way of cooperation and harmony of each other rationally and efficiently.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.181-208
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• 2010

In July 2007, Korean government has passed "The Capital Market and Financial Investment Services Act" to further develop the capital markets and the Act was to become effective in February 2009. Using a large sample of Korean firms, we have examined (i) the effect of underwriting activities on the firm value (bond spread) comparing commercial bank and investment bank, and (ii) the determinants of the firm value changes following underwriting activities of bank. To test our goal, we collected a wide range of samples of data for bond issuing activities executed by Korean firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange (KSE) between 2000 and 2003. Our paper is distinguished from previous studies on this subject in a way that we analyzed the effect of corporate bond underwriting activities with regard to commercial banking and investment banking. Initially, we set up a hypothesis that "Certification View" and "Conflict-of-interest View" are major driving forces behind cross-firm differences in performance following bond issuance. We find that, in general, underwriting by investment bank (securities company) brings a positive effect on the firm value (spread between bench mark rate and bond issuing rate). This result indicates that firm value has been negatively affected by the bank underwriting and provides the evidence for "Conflict-of-interest View" in Korea. Our studies have also revealed that any change in firm value following bond issuance is positively related with the firm size (total asset), operating performance, liquidity (cashflow), and equity ownership by foreign investors. Overall, our results support the view that bank underwriting activities can play an important role in determining firm value and financial strategies under "The Capital Market and Financial Investment Services Act" of 2007.

• KIPS Transactions on Computer and Communication Systems
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.143-150
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• 2012

A simulation methodology and corresponding program based on it is to be discussed for analyzing the effects of the networking operation of existing DHC system in connection with CHP system on-site. The practical simulation for arbitrary areas with various building compositions is carried out for the analysis of operational features in both systems, and the various aspects of thermal energy grids with connecting operation are highlighted through the detailed assessment of predicted results. The intrinsic operational features of CHP prime movers, gas engine, gas turbine etc., are effectively implemented by realizing the performance data, i.e. actual operation efficiency in the full and part loads range. For the sake of simplicity, a simple mathematical correlation model is proposed for simulating various aspects of change effectively on the existing DHC system side due to the connecting operation, instead of performing cycle simulations separately. The empirical correlations are developed using the hourly based annual operation data for a branch of the Korean District Heating Corporation (KDHC) and are implicit in relation between main operation parameters such as fuel consumption by use, heat and power production. In the simulation, a variety of system configurations are able to be considered according to any combination of the probable CHP prime-movers, absorption or turbo type cooling chillers of every kind and capacity. From the analysis of the thermal network operation simulations, it is found that the newly proposed methodology of mathematical correlation for modelling of the existing DHC system functions effectively in reflecting the operational variations due to thermal energy grids with connecting operation. The effects of intrinsic features of CHP prime-movers, e.g. the different ratio of heat and power production, various combinations of different types of chillers (i.e. absorption and turbo types) on the overall system operation are discussed in detail with the consideration of operation schemes and corresponding simulation algorithms.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.23-38
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• 2012

There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems. Our experiments use a real dataset acquired from one of the largest internet shopping malls in Korea. We use 66,278 transactions of 3,847 customers conducted during the last two years. Overall results show that the accuracy of association rules of frequent shoppers (whose average duration between orders is relatively short) is higher than that of causal shoppers. In addition we discover that with frequent shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears very high when the co-occurrence criteria of the training set corresponds to the validation set (i.e., target set). It implies that the co-occurrence criteria of frequent shoppers should be set according to the application purpose period. For example, an analyzer should use a day as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to offer a coupon valid only for a day to potential customers who will use the coupon. On the contrary, an analyzer should use a month as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to publish a coupon book that can be used for a month. In the case of causal shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears to not be affected by the period of the application purposes. The accuracy of the causal shoppers' association rules becomes higher when the longer co-occurrence criterion has been adopted. It implies that an analyzer has to set the co-occurrence criterion for as long as possible, regardless of the application purpose period.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.2358-2370
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• 2010

This research aims to empirically analyze the factors that affect the success of technology marketing by Korean universities. The total of 207 universities which successfully made technology transfers from 2006 to 2008 was examined to test the nine hypotheses. For the purpose of testing the hypotheses, technology infrastructure (research costs and the number of SCIE papers), the compensation system for the patents (application and registration), the number of patents (application and registration), TLO staff (the number of people in charge of technology transfer and the job experience in industries), the compensation system for technology transfers (researchers and contributors), and attitudes of university management and industries were analyzed with structural equation methods to figure out their effects on the revenues of technology transfer. The results of this research are summarized as follows. First, technology infrastructures of universities were found to have positive effects on securing patents. As the university research costs in the field of science and technology are increases, the research capabilities are enhanced and this a larger number of researchers are conducted. Second, this research shows that compensation systems for patent application and registration in universities have motivated researchers to take out patents for the outputs of their research. Third, the number of patents universities possess was found to have a positive effect on technology transfer. An increase in the number of patents universities possess implies an increase in the diversity and excellence of the target technologies for transfer. Fourth, the number of patents universities possess turned out to have a positive effect on TLO staff. The number of experts in charge of technology transfer including technology dealers, valuation analysis and patent attorneys should be increased as target technologies for transfer increase according to the increase of patents possessed. Because the technologies are transferee from universities to businesses, businesses (job) experience of TLO staff in industries are also important. This research is meaningful because it has identified the factors affecting the results of technology transfer by employing structural equation methods. In particular, an official governmental survey data for the academic-industrial cooperation were analyzed systematically in terms of technology infrastructure, compensation systems related to patents, the number of patents, TLO staff, compensation systems for technology transfer, and attitudes of university management and industries. All these facts might could differentiate this study from the previous studies.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.321-355
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• 1993

This paper focuses on the geographical pattern of financial activities in the Korean urban system during 1975-1990, based on the assumption that financial activities can reveal control points in Korea's urban economy. In terms of spatial evolution of financial insitutions, different locational characteristics are revealed among different types of financial institutions, implying the role of urban hierarchy. Financial resources are highly concentrated in the capital region, Seoul and Kyonggi Province. Both centralization trends into the large metropolitan cities and relative declines of medium and small cities within the Korean urban system, have been experienced over the study period. Financial activities sustain relatively stable hierarchical structure in the urban hierarchy. Regarding the financial flows, dominant flow zones centered on major metropolitan cities are identified, clearly showing a prominant role of Seoul in financial flows in the entire urban system.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.336-344
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• 2010

Considering the increasing trends of the consumption of livestock products in Korea, proper hygienic management and policies for ensuring their safety to protect public health and strengthen consumer confidence are demanded. It is particularly important to manage the livestock distribution processes to provide safe meat and meat products. This study was conducted to examine factors related to the hygiene management of livestock products and to check out the condition of hygienic management in meat markets. To accomplish this, 156 meat markets divided into HACCP-certified and non certified and evaluated for five factors, which received the following scores: facility and equipment management (1.00/2.0 points, 50.0%), storage and transport management (1.93/2.0 points, 96.5%), work place management (0.76/2.0 points, 38.0%), personal hygiene management (0.75/2.0 points, 37.5%), and inspection management (0.22/2.0 points, 11.0%). The results revealed that the scores of HACCP-certified meat markets were significantly higher than those of the non certified markets (p<0.05, p<0.01, p<0.001). These findings suggest that meat markets that are not HACCP-certified must improve hygienic management conditions and educate their employees to improve the safety of livestock products during distribution.