• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.67-83
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• 2023

The social venture start-up phenomenon is found from the perspectives of social enterprise and for-profit enterprise. This study aims to fundamentally explore the start-up phenomenon of social ventures from these two perspectives. Considering the lack of prior research that researched both social and commercial perspectives at the same time, this paper analyzed using grounded theory approach of Strauss & Corbin(1998), an inductive research method that analyzes based on prior research and interview data. In order to collect data for this study, eight corporate representatives currently operating social ventures were interviewed and data and phenomena were analyzed. This progressed to a theoretical saturation where no additional information was derived. The analysis results of this study using the grounded theory approach are as follows. As a result of open coding and axial coding, 147 concepts and 70 subcategories were derived, and 18 categories were derived through the final abstraction process. In the selective coding, 'expansion of social venture entry in the social domain' and 'expansion of social function of for-profit companies' were selected as key categories, and a story line was formed around this. In this study, we saw that it is necessary to conduct academic research and analysis on the competitive factors required for companies that pursue the values of two conflicting relationships, such as social ventures, to survive with competitiveness. In practice, concepts such as collaboration with for-profit companies, value combination, entrepreneurship competency and performance improvement, social value execution competency reinforcement, communication strategy, for-profit enterprise value investment, and entrepreneur management competency were derived. This study explains the social venture phenomenon for social enterprises, commercial enterprises, and entrepreneurs who want to enter the social venture field. It is expected to provide the implications necessary for successful social venture startups.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.77-97
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• 2010

Market timing is an investment strategy which is used for obtaining excessive return from financial market. In general, detection of market timing means determining when to buy and sell to get excess return from trading. In many market timing systems, trading rules have been used as an engine to generate signals for trade. On the other hand, some researchers proposed the rough set analysis as a proper tool for market timing because it does not generate a signal for trade when the pattern of the market is uncertain by using the control function. The data for the rough set analysis should be discretized of numeric value because the rough set only accepts categorical data for analysis. Discretization searches for proper "cuts" for numeric data that determine intervals. All values that lie within each interval are transformed into same value. In general, there are four methods for data discretization in rough set analysis including equal frequency scaling, expert's knowledge-based discretization, minimum entropy scaling, and na$\ddot{i}$ve and Boolean reasoning-based discretization. Equal frequency scaling fixes a number of intervals and examines the histogram of each variable, then determines cuts so that approximately the same number of samples fall into each of the intervals. Expert's knowledge-based discretization determines cuts according to knowledge of domain experts through literature review or interview with experts. Minimum entropy scaling implements the algorithm based on recursively partitioning the value set of each variable so that a local measure of entropy is optimized. Na$\ddot{i}$ve and Booleanreasoning-based discretization searches categorical values by using Na$\ddot{i}$ve scaling the data, then finds the optimized dicretization thresholds through Boolean reasoning. Although the rough set analysis is promising for market timing, there is little research on the impact of the various data discretization methods on performance from trading using the rough set analysis. In this study, we compare stock market timing models using rough set analysis with various data discretization methods. The research data used in this study are the KOSPI 200 from May 1996 to October 1998. KOSPI 200 is the underlying index of the KOSPI 200 futures which is the first derivative instrument in the Korean stock market. The KOSPI 200 is a market value weighted index which consists of 200 stocks selected by criteria on liquidity and their status in corresponding industry including manufacturing, construction, communication, electricity and gas, distribution and services, and financing. The total number of samples is 660 trading days. In addition, this study uses popular technical indicators as independent variables. The experimental results show that the most profitable method for the training sample is the na$\ddot{i}$ve and Boolean reasoning but the expert's knowledge-based discretization is the most profitable method for the validation sample. In addition, the expert's knowledge-based discretization produced robust performance for both of training and validation sample. We also compared rough set analysis and decision tree. This study experimented C4.5 for the comparison purpose. The results show that rough set analysis with expert's knowledge-based discretization produced more profitable rules than C4.5.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.111-126
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• 2020

Most industries have recently become aware of the importance of customer lifetime value as they are exposed to a competitive environment. As a result, preventing customers from churn is becoming a more important business issue than securing new customers. This is because maintaining churn customers is far more economical than securing new customers, and in fact, the acquisition cost of new customers is known to be five to six times higher than the maintenance cost of churn customers. Also, Companies that effectively prevent customer churn and improve customer retention rates are known to have a positive effect on not only increasing the company's profitability but also improving its brand image by improving customer satisfaction. Predicting customer churn, which had been conducted as a sub-research area for CRM, has recently become more important as a big data-based performance marketing theme due to the development of business machine learning technology. Until now, research on customer churn prediction has been carried out actively in such sectors as the mobile telecommunication industry, the financial industry, the distribution industry, and the game industry, which are highly competitive and urgent to manage churn. In addition, These churn prediction studies were focused on improving the performance of the churn prediction model itself, such as simply comparing the performance of various models, exploring features that are effective in forecasting departures, or developing new ensemble techniques, and were limited in terms of practical utilization because most studies considered the entire customer group as a group and developed a predictive model. As such, the main purpose of the existing related research was to improve the performance of the predictive model itself, and there was a relatively lack of research to improve the overall customer churn prediction process. In fact, customers in the business have different behavior characteristics due to heterogeneous transaction patterns, and the resulting churn rate is different, so it is unreasonable to assume the entire customer as a single customer group. Therefore, it is desirable to segment customers according to customer classification criteria, such as loyalty, and to operate an appropriate churn prediction model individually, in order to carry out effective customer churn predictions in heterogeneous industries. Of course, in some studies, there are studies in which customers are subdivided using clustering techniques and applied a churn prediction model for individual customer groups. Although this process of predicting churn can produce better predictions than a single predict model for the entire customer population, there is still room for improvement in that clustering is a mechanical, exploratory grouping technique that calculates distances based on inputs and does not reflect the strategic intent of an entity such as loyalties. This study proposes a segment-based customer departure prediction process (CCP/2DL: Customer Churn Prediction based on Two-Dimensional Loyalty segmentation) based on two-dimensional customer loyalty, assuming that successful customer churn management can be better done through improvements in the overall process than through the performance of the model itself. CCP/2DL is a series of churn prediction processes that segment two-way, quantitative and qualitative loyalty-based customer, conduct secondary grouping of customer segments according to churn patterns, and then independently apply heterogeneous churn prediction models for each churn pattern group. Performance comparisons were performed with the most commonly applied the General churn prediction process and the Clustering-based churn prediction process to assess the relative excellence of the proposed churn prediction process. The General churn prediction process used in this study refers to the process of predicting a single group of customers simply intended to be predicted as a machine learning model, using the most commonly used churn predicting method. And the Clustering-based churn prediction process is a method of first using clustering techniques to segment customers and implement a churn prediction model for each individual group. In cooperation with a global NGO, the proposed CCP/2DL performance showed better performance than other methodologies for predicting churn. This churn prediction process is not only effective in predicting churn, but can also be a strategic basis for obtaining a variety of customer observations and carrying out other related performance marketing activities.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.89-111
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• 2008

Due to the development of digital technology, studies regarding smart wear integrating daily life have rapidly increased. However, consumer research about perception and attitude toward smart clothing hardly could find. The purpose of this study was to identify innovative characteristics and perceived risk of smart clothing and to analyze the influences of theses factors on product attitudes and intention to adopt. Specifically, five hypotheses were established. H1: Perceived attributes of smart clothing except for complexity would have positive relations to product attitude or purchase intention, while complexity would be opposite. H2: Product attitude would have positive relation to purchase intention. H3: Product attitude would have a mediating effect between perceived attributes and purchase intention. H4: Perceived risks of smart clothing would have negative relations to perceived attributes except for complexity, and positive relations to complexity. H5: Product attitude would have a mediating effect between perceived risks and purchase intention. A self-administered questionnaire was developed based on previous studies. After pretest, the data were collected during September, 2006, from university students in Korea who were relatively sensitive to innovative products. A total of 300 final useful questionnaire were analyzed by SPSS 13.0 program. About 60.3% were male with the mean age of 21.3 years old. About 59.3% reported that they were aware of smart clothing, but only 9 respondents purchased it. The mean of attitudes toward smart clothing and purchase intention was 2.96 (SD=.56) and 2.63 (SD=.65) respectively. Factor analysis using principal components with varimax rotation was conducted to identify perceived attribute and perceived risk dimensions. Perceived attributes of smart wear were categorized into relative advantage (including compatibility), observability (including triability), and complexity. Perceived risks were identified into physical/performance risk, social psychological risk, time loss risk, and economic risk. Regression analysis was conducted to test five hypotheses. Relative advantage and observability were significant predictors of product attitude (adj $R^2$=.223) and purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.221). Complexity showed negative influence on product attitude. Product attitude presented significant relation to purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.692) and partial mediating effect between perceived attributes and purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.698). Therefore hypothesis one to three were accepted. In order to test hypothesis four, four dimensions of perceived risk and demographic variables (age, gender, monthly household income, awareness of smart clothing, and purchase experience) were entered as independent variables in the regression models. Social psychological risk, economic risk, and gender (female) were significant to predict relative advantage (adj $R^2$=.276). When perceived observability was a dependent variable, social psychological risk, time loss risk, physical/performance risk, and age (younger) were significant in order (adj $R^2$=.144). However, physical/performance risk was positively related to observability. The more Koreans seemed to be observable of smart clothing, the more increased the probability of physical harm or performance problems received. Complexity was predicted by product awareness, social psychological risk, economic risk, and purchase experience in order (adj $R^2$=.114). Product awareness was negatively related to complexity, meaning high level of product awareness would reduce complexity of smart clothing. However, purchase experience presented positive relation with complexity. It appears that consumers can perceive high level of complexity when they are actually consuming smart clothing in real life. Risk variables were positively related with complexity. That is, in order to decrease complexity, it is also necessary to consider minimizing anxiety factors about social psychological wound or loss of money. Thus, hypothesis 4 was partially accepted. Finally, in testing hypothesis 5, social psychological risk and economic risk were significant predictors for product attitude (adj $R^2$=.122) and purchase intention (adj $R^2$=.099) respectively. When attitude variable was included with risk variables as independent variables in the regression model to predict purchase intention, only attitude variable was significant (adj $R^2$=.691). Thus attitude variable presented full mediating effect between perceived risks and purchase intention, and hypothesis 5 was accepted. Findings would provide guidelines for fashion and electronic businesses who aim to create and strengthen positive attitude toward smart clothing. Marketers need to consider not only functional feature of smart clothing, but also practical and aesthetic attributes, since appropriateness for social norm or self image would reduce uncertainty of psychological or social risk, which increase relative advantage of smart clothing. Actually social psychological risk was significantly associated to relative advantage. Economic risk is negatively associated with product attitudes as well as purchase intention, suggesting that smart-wear developers have to reflect on price ranges of potential adopters. It will be effective to utilize the findings associated with complexity when marketers in US plan communication strategy.

• Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.166-182
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• 1994

Kyonggi Province in the late Chosun dynasty was a center of superior government offices including 'Han' River water-road transportation and was located in the middle of an 'X'-shaped arterial road network. Because of these reasons, Kyonggi Province had a faster inflow of commodities, informations and technics compared with the other province. At this period of time, every local 'Eup' (name of administrative district) had not been affected by their above administrative districts and had their own autonomy. For this reason, every 'Eup' could be developed as a town, even if its size was small when it had sufficient internal growing conditions. Moreover, the markets ('Si-Jon') in big towns and periodical markets which were spread over the Kyonggi Province played role of commercial functions of town. And because military bases for the defence of the royal capital in Kyonggi Province also took parts of a non-agricultural city role, Xyonggi Provinc had much more possibilities of growing as a town rather than the other provinces. The towns of the late Chosun Dynasty were, except the capital and superior administrative districts which were governed by the 'You-Su', small towns which had only about 3, 000-5, 000 people. Most of the town dewellers were local officials, nobles, merchants, craftmen and slaves. And the farmers who lived near town became a pseudo-towner through suburb agriculture. Among these people, the merchants were leaders of townization. The downtowns were affected by the landform and traffic roads. The most fundamental function of towns were administrative. The opcial's grade, which was dispatched to the local administrative district ('Kun' or 'Hyun'), was decided by the size of population and agricultural land of each county. Large county which was governed by a high ranking opcial had more possibilities to develop as a large town. Because they supervised other opcials of lower rank and obtained more land and population for the town. The phonomena of farm abandonment after the Japanese Invasion of Korea in 1592-1598 stimulated the development of towns for commercial function. The commercial functions of towns were evident in the Si-Jon or Nan-Jon (names of markets) in the big cities such as Hansung and Kaesung, meanffwhile in the local areas it was emerged in the shape of periodical market networks as allied with near markets (which were called as Jang-Si) or permanent markets which were grown up from periodical markets. These facts of commercial development induced the birth of commercial town. Kyonggi Province showed the weak points of its defense system during both wars (Japanese Invasion in 1592 and Manchu's Invasion in 1636). The government reinforced its defense system by adding 4 'You-Su-Bus' and several military bases. Each local districts ('Eup'), where Geo-Jins were established, were stimulated to be a town while Jin-Kwan system were, adjusted and enforced. Among Dok-Jins(name of solitary military bases), Youngjongjin was grown up as a large garrison town which only played a role of defense. The number of towns that took roles of non-agricultural functions in Kyonggi Province was 52. Among these towns, 29 were developed as big towns which had above 3, 000 people and most of these towns were located on the northwest-southeast axes of 'X'-shaped arterial trafic network in the Chosn Dynasty, This fact points out that the traffic road is one of the important causes of the development of towns. When we make hierarchy of the towns of Kyonggi Province according to its population and how many functions it had, we can make it as 6 grades. The virst grade town 'Hansung' was the biggest central town of administration, commerce and defdnse. The 2nd grade town includes 'Kaesung' which had historical inertia that it had been the capital of the Koryo Dynesty. The 3rd grade towns include some 'You- Su-Bus' such as Soowon, Kanghwa, Kwangju and also include Mapo, Yongsan and from this we can imagine that the commercial development in the late Chosun Dynasty extremely affected the townization. The 4th-6th grade towns had smiliar population but it can be discriminated by how many town functions it had. So the 4th grade towns were the core of administration, commerce and defense function. 5th grade towns had administrative functions and one of commercial and defense functions. 6th grade towns had only one of these functions. When we research and town conditions of each grades as the ratio of non-agricultural population, we can find out that the towns from the 1st grade to 4th grade show difference by degree of townization but from the 4th grade to 6th grade towns do not show big difference in general.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.17-26
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• 2010

Recently concerns have been raised due to the unbalanced supply of crops: the price of crops has been unstable and at one point the price went up so high that the word Agflation(agriculture+ inflation) was coined. Korea, in particular, is a small-sized country and needs to secure the stable supply of crops by investing in the produce importation at a national level. Investment in foreign produce importation is becoming more important as a measure for sufficient supply of crops, limited supply of domestic crops, weakened farming conditions worldwide, as well as recent changes in the use of crops due to the development of bio-fuels, influence of carbon emission on crops, the price increase in crops, and influx of foreign hot money. However, there are many problems with investing in foreign produce importation: lack of support from the government; lack of farming information and technology; difficulty in securing the capital; no immediate pay-off from the investment and insufficient management. Although foreign produce is originally more price-competitive than domestic produce, it loses its competiveness in the process of importation (due to high tariffs) and poor distribution system, which makes it difficult to sell in Korea. Therefore, investment in foreign produce importation is being questioned for feasibility; to make it possible, foreign produce must maintain the price-competitiveness. Especially, harvest of agricultural products depends on natural and geographical conditions of each country and those products have indigenous properties, so distribution system according to import and export of agricultural products should be treated more carefully than that of other industries. Distribution costs are differentiated into each item and include cost of sorting and wrapping, cost of wrapping materials, cost of domestic transport, cost of international transport and cost of clearing customs for import and export. So transporting and storing agricultural products generates considerable costs compared with other products. Also, due to upgrade of dietary life, needs for stability, taste and visible quality toward food including agricultural products are being raised and wrong way of storage causes decomposition of food and loss of freshness, making the storage more difficult than that in room temperature, so storage and transport in distribution of agricultural products needs specialty. In addition, because lack of specialty in distribution and circulation such as storage and wrapping does not solve limit factors in distance, the distribution and circulation has been limited to a form of import and export within short-distant region. Therefore, need for distribution out-sourcing which can satisfy specialty in managing distribution and circulation and it is needed to establish more effective distribution system. However, existing distribution system of agricultural products is exposed to various problems including problems in distribution channel, making distribution and strategy for distribution and those problems are as follows. First, in case of investment in overseas agricultural industry, stable supply of the products is difficult because areas of production are dispersed widely and influenced by outer factors due to including overseas distribution channels. Also, at the aspect of quality, standardization of products is difficult, distribution system is quite complicated and unreasonable due to long distribution channels according to international trade and financial and institutional support is not enough. Especially, there are quite a lot of ineffective factors including multi level distribution process, dramatic gap between production cost and customer's cost, lack of physical distribution facilities and difficulties in storage and transport due to lack of wrapping containers. Besides, because import and export of agricultural products has been manages under the company's own distribution according to transaction contract between manufacturers and exporting company, efficiency is low due to excessive investment in fixed costs and lack of specialty in dealing with agricultural products causes fall of value of products, showing the limit to lose price-competitiveness. Especially, because lack of specialty in distribution and circulation such as storage and wrapping does not solve limit factors in distance, the distribution and circulation has been limited to a form of import and export within short-distant region. Therefore, need for distribution out-sourcing which can satisfy specialty in managing distribution and circulation and it is needed to establish more effective distribution system. Second, among tangible and intangible services which promote the efficiency of the whole distribution, a function building distribution environment which includes distribution information, system for standard and inspection, distribution finance, system for diversification of risks, education and training, distribution administration and tax system is wanted. In general, such a function building distribution environment is difficult to be changed and supplement innovatively because its effect compared with investment does not appear immediately despite of its necessity. Especially, in case of distribution of agricultural products, as a function of collecting and distributing is performed individually through various channels, the importance of distribution information and standardization is getting more focus due to the problem of repetition of work and lack of specialty. Also, efficient management of distribution is quite difficult due to lack of professionals in distribution, so support to professional education is needed. Third, though effort to keep self-sufficiency ratio of staple food, rice is regarded as important at the government level, level of dependency on overseas of others crops is high. Therefore, plan for stable securing food resources aside from staple food is also necessary. Especially, governmental organizations of agricultural products distribution in Korea are production-centered and have unreasonable structure whose function at the aspect of distribution and consumption is quite insufficient. And development of new distribution channels which can deal with changes in distribution environment and they do not achieve actual results of strategy for distribution due to non-positive strategy for price distribution. That is, it implies the possibility that base for supply will become vulnerable because it does not mediate appropriate interests on total distribution channels such as manufacturers, wholesale dealers and vendors by emphasizing consumer protection excessively in the distribution of agricultural products. Therefore, this study examined fundamental concept and actual situation for our investment to overseas agriculture, drew necessities, considerations, problems, etc. of overseas agricultural investment and suggested improvements at the level of distribution for price competitiveness of agricultural products cultivated in overseas under five aspects; government's indirect support, distribution's modernization and distribution information function's strengthening, government's political support for distribution facility, transportation route, load and unloading works' improvement, price competitiveness' securing, professional manpower's cultivation by education and training, etc. Here are some suggestions for foreign produce importation. First, the government should conduct a survey on the current distribution channels and analyze the situation to establish a measure for long-term development plans. By providing each agricultural area with a guideline for planning appropriate production of crops, the government can help farmers be ready for importation, and prevent them from producing same crops all at the same time. Government can sign an MOU with the foreign government and promote the importation so that the development of agricultural resources can be stable and steady. Second, the government can establish a strategy for an effective distribution system by providing farmers and agriculture-related workers with the distribution information such as price, production, demand, market structure and location, feature of each crop, and etc. In order for such distribution system to become feasible, the government needs to reconstruct the current distribution system, designate a public organization for providing distribution information and set the criteria for level of produce quality, trade units, and package units. Third, the government should provide financial support and a policy to seek an efficient distribution channel for foreign produce to be delivered fresh: the government should expand distribution facilities (for selecting, packaging, storing, and processing) and transportation vehicles while modernizing old facilities. There should be another policy to improve the efficiency of unloading, and to lower the cost of distribution. Fourth, it is necessary to enact a new law covering exceptional cases for importing produce in order to maintain the price competitiveness; currently the high tariffs is keeping the imported produce from being distributed domestically. However, the new adjustment should be made carefully within the WTO regulations since it can create a problem from giving preferential tariffs. The government can also simplify the distribution channels in order to reduce the cost in the distribution process. Fifth, the government should educate distributors to raise the efficiency and to modernize the distribution system. It is necessary to develop human resources by educating people regarding the foreign agricultural environment, the produce quality, management skills, and by introducing some successful cases in advanced countries.