• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.53-74
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• 2018

Since South Korea has an economic structure that has a characteristic which market-dependent on overseas, the tourism industry is considered as a very important industry for the national economy, such as improving the country's balance of payments or providing income and employment increases. Accordingly, the necessity of more accurate forecasting on the demand in the tourism industry has been raised to promote its industry. In the related research, economic variables such as exchange rate and income have been used as variables influencing tourism demand. As information technology has been widely used, some researchers have also analyzed the effect of media on tourism demand. It has shown that the media has a considerable influence on traveler's decision making, such as choosing an outbound destination. Furthermore, with the recent availability of online information searches to obtain the latest information and two-way communication in social media, it is possible to obtain up-to-date information on travel more quickly than before. The information in online media such as blogs can naturally create the Word-of-Mouth effect by sharing useful information, which is called eWOM. Like all other service industries, the tourism industry is characterized by difficulty in evaluating its values before it is experienced directly. And furthermore, most of the travelers tend to search for more information in advance from various sources to reduce the perceived risk to the destination, so they can also be influenced by online media such as online news. In this study, we suggested that the number of online media posting, which causes the effects of Word-of-Mouth, may have an effect on the number of outbound travelers. We divided online media into public media and private media according to their characteristics and selected online news as public media and blog as private media, one of the most popular social media in tourist information. Based on the previous studies about the eWOM effects on online news and blog, we analyzed a relationship between the volume of eWOM and the outbound tourism demand through the panel model. To this end, we collected data on the number of national outbound travelers from 2007 to 2015 provided by the Korea Tourism Organization. According to statistics, the highest number of outbound tourism demand in Korea are China, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines, which are selected as a dependent variable in this study. In order to measure the volume of eWOM, we collected online news and blog postings for the same period as the number of outbound travelers in Naver, which is the largest portal site in South Korea. In this study, a panel model was established to analyze the effect of online media on the demand of Korean outbound travelers and to identify that there was a significant difference in the influence of online media by each time and countries. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the impact of the online news and blog eWOM on the number of outbound travelers was significant. We found that the number of online news and blog posting have an influence on the number of outbound travelers, especially the experimental result suggests that both the month that includes the departure date and the three months before the departure were found to have an effect. It is shown that online news and blog are online media that have a significant influence on outbound tourism demand. Next, we found that the increased volume of eWOM in online news has a negative effect on departure, while the increase in a blog has a positive effect. The result with the country-specific models would be the same. This paper shows that online media can be used as a new variable in tourism demand by examining the influence of the eWOM effect of the online media. Also, we found that both social media and news media have an important role in predicting and managing the Korean tourism demand and that the influence of those two media appears different depending on the country.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.59-77
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• 2015

Social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook, provide abundant social comparison opportunities. Given the widespread use of SNSs, the purpose of the present study was to examine the impact of exposure to social media-based social comparison on user's negative emotions and discontinuous use intention on SNS. We present evidence that under the use of SNS, social comparison activities diverge into three patterns, with explicit self-evaluation desire made against similar target (lateral comparison), self-defense desire made against less fortunate target (downward comparison), and self-enhancement desire made with more fortunate target (upward comparison). Such social comparison processes frequently arise, as people are increasingly using on SNSs, the downward contacts ameliorating self-esteem with positive emotions, but the upward contacts and standard contacts with lateral status enabling a person to compare his or her situation with others and simultaneously increase negative emotions due to its differences with others. In other words, as people increasingly relying on SNSs for a variety of everyday tasks, they risk overexposure to upward or standard social comparison information that may have a cumulative detrimental impact on future intention on SNS use. This study with survey with 209 SNS users found that these negative emotions lead to negative fatigue (attitude) and then discontinuous use intention (behavior) on SNS. Our findings are among the first to explicitly examine discontinuous use intention on SNS using social comparison theory and our results are consistent with those of past research showing that upward social comparisons can be detrimental.

• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.257-280
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• 2022

In this study, we analyzed comments on news articles of representative companies of the three industries (i.e., semiconductor, secondary battery, and bio industries) that had been listed as national strategic technology projects of South Korea to identify public opinions towards them. In addition, we analyzed the relationship between changes in public opinion and stock price. 'Samsung Electronics' and 'SK Hynix' in the semiconductor industry, 'Samsung SDI' and 'LG Chem' in the secondary battery industry, and 'Samsung Biologics' and 'Celltrion' in the bio-industry were selected as the representative companies and 47,452 comments of news articles about the companies that had been published from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020, were collected from Naver News. The comments were grouped into positive, neutral, and negative emotions, and the dynamic topics of comments over time in each group were analyzed to identify the trends of public opinion in each industry. As a result, in the case of the semiconductor industry, investment, COVID-19 related issues, trust in large companies such as Samsung Electronics, and mention of the damage caused by changes in government policy were the topics. In the case of secondary battery industries, references to investment, battery, and corporate issues were the topics. In the case of bio-industries, references to investment, COVID-19 related issues, and corporate issues were the topics. Next, to understand whether the sentiment of the comments is related to the actual stock price, for each company, the changes in the stock price and the sentiment values of the comments were compared and analyzed using visual analytics. As a result, we found a clear relationship between the changes in the sentiment value of public opinion and the stock price through the similar patterns shown in the change graphs. This study analyzed comments on news articles that are highly related to stock price, identified changes in public opinion trends in the COVID-19 era, and provided objective feedback to government agencies' policymaking.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.155-175
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• 2017

As social data become into the spotlight, mainstream web search engines provide data indicate how many people searched specific keyword: Web Search Traffic data. Web search traffic information is collection of each crowd that search for specific keyword. In a various area, web search traffic can be used as one of useful variables that represent the attention of common users on specific interests. A lot of studies uses web search traffic data to nowcast or forecast social phenomenon such as epidemic prediction, consumer pattern analysis, product life cycle, financial invest modeling and so on. Also web search traffic data have begun to be applied to predict tourist inbound. Proper demand prediction is needed because tourism is high value-added industry as increasing employment and foreign exchange. Among those tourists, especially Chinese tourists: Youke is continuously growing nowadays, Youke has been largest tourist inbound of Korea tourism for many years and tourism profits per one Youke as well. It is important that research into proper demand prediction approaches of Youke in both public and private sector. Accurate tourism demands prediction is important to efficient decision making in a limited resource. This study suggests improved model that reflects latest issue of society by presented the attention from group of individual. Trip abroad is generally high-involvement activity so that potential tourists likely deep into searching for information about their own trip. Web search traffic data presents tourists' attention in the process of preparation their journey instantaneous and dynamic way. So that this study attempted select key words that potential Chinese tourists likely searched out internet. Baidu-Chinese biggest web search engine that share over 80%- provides users with accessing to web search traffic data. Qualitative interview with potential tourists helps us to understand the information search behavior before a trip and identify the keywords for this study. Selected key words of web search traffic are categorized by how much directly related to "Korean Tourism" in a three levels. Classifying categories helps to find out which keyword can explain Youke inbound demands from close one to far one as distance of category. Web search traffic data of each key words gathered by web crawler developed to crawling web search data onto Baidu Index. Using automatically gathered variable data, linear model is designed by multiple regression analysis for suitable for operational application of decision and policy making because of easiness to explanation about variables' effective relationship. After regression linear models have composed, comparing with model composed traditional variables and model additional input web search traffic data variables to traditional model has conducted by significance and R squared. after comparing performance of models, final model is composed. Final regression model has improved explanation and advantage of real-time immediacy and convenience than traditional model. Furthermore, this study demonstrates system intuitively visualized to general use -Youke Mining solution has several functions of tourist decision making including embed final regression model. Youke Mining solution has algorithm based on data science and well-designed simple interface. In the end this research suggests three significant meanings on theoretical, practical and political aspects. Theoretically, Youke Mining system and the model in this research are the first step on the Youke inbound prediction using interactive and instant variable: web search traffic information represents tourists' attention while prepare their trip. Baidu web search traffic data has more than 80% of web search engine market. Practically, Baidu data could represent attention of the potential tourists who prepare their own tour as real-time. Finally, in political way, designed Chinese tourist demands prediction model based on web search traffic can be used to tourism decision making for efficient managing of resource and optimizing opportunity for successful policy.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.