• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.117-129
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• 2015

As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, a large volume of information is posted on the Internet with exponential growth every day. Accordingly, it is not unusual that investors in stock markets gather and compile firm-specific or market-wide information through online searches. Importantly, it becomes easier for investors to acquire value-relevant information for their investment decision with the help of powerful search tools on the Internet. Our study examines whether or not the Internet helps investors assess a firm's value better by using firm-level data over long periods spanning from January 2004 to December 2013. To this end, we construct weekly-based search volume for information technology (IT) services firms on the Internet. We limit our focus to IT firms since they are often equipped with intangible assets and relatively less recognized to the public which makes them hard-to measure. To obtain the information on those firms, investors are more likely to consult the Internet and use the information to appreciate the firms more accurately and eventually improve their investment decisions. Prior studies have shown that changes in search volumes can reflect the various aspects of the complex human behaviors and forecast near-term values of economic indicators, including automobile sales, unemployment claims, and etc. Moreover, search volume of firm names or stock ticker symbols has been used as a direct proxy of individual investors' attention in financial markets since, different from indirect measures such as turnover and extreme returns, they can reveal and quantify the interest of investors in an objective way. Following this line of research, this study aims to gauge whether the information retrieved from the Internet is value relevant in assessing a firm. We also use search volume for analysis but, distinguished from prior studies, explore its impact on return comovements with market returns. Given that a firm's returns tend to comove with market returns excessively when investors are less informed about the firm, we empirically test the value of information by examining the association between Internet searches and the extent to which a firm's returns comove. Our results show that Internet searches are negatively associated with return comovements as expected. When sample is split by the size of firms, the impact of Internet searches on return comovements is shown to be greater for large firms than small ones. Interestingly, we find a greater impact of Internet searches on return comovements for years from 2009 to 2013 than earlier years possibly due to more aggressive and informative exploit of Internet searches in obtaining financial information. We also complement our analyses by examining the association between return volatility and Internet search volumes. If Internet searches capture investors' attention associated with a change in firm-specific fundamentals such as new product releases, stock splits and so on, a firm's return volatility is likely to increase while search results can provide value-relevant information to investors. Our results suggest that in general, an increase in the volume of Internet searches is not positively associated with return volatility. However, we find a positive association between Internet searches and return volatility when the sample is limited to larger firms. A stronger result from larger firms implies that investors still pay less attention to the information obtained from Internet searches for small firms while the information is value relevant in assessing stock values. However, we do find any systematic differences in the magnitude of Internet searches impact on return volatility by time periods. Taken together, our results shed new light on the value of information searched from the Internet in assessing stock values. Given the informational role of the Internet in stock markets, we believe the results would guide investors to exploit Internet search tools to be better informed, as a result improving their investment decisions.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.239-276
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• 2009

The paper investigates the possible relationship between earnings prediction by security analysts and special ownership ties that link security companies those analysts belong to and firms under analysis. "Security analysts" are known best for their role as information producers in stock markets where imperfect information is prevalent and transaction costs are high. In such a market, changes in the fundamental value of a company are not spontaneously reflected in the stock price, and the security analysts actively produce and distribute the relevant information crucial for the price mechanism to operate efficiently. Therefore, securing the fairness and accuracy of information they provide is very important for efficiencyof resource allocation as well as protection of investors who are excluded from the special relationship. Evidence of systematic distortion of information by the special tie naturally calls for regulatory intervention, if found. However, one cannot presuppose the existence of distorted information based on the common ownership between the appraiser and the appraisee. Reputation effect is especially cherished by security firms and among analysts as indispensable intangible asset in the industry, and the incentive to maintain good reputation by providing accurate earnings prediction may overweigh the incentive to offer favorable rating or stock recommendation for the firms that are affiliated by common ownership. This study shares the theme of existing literature concerning the effect of conflict of interests on the accuracy of analyst's predictions. This study, however, focuses on the potential conflict of interest situation that may originate from the Korea-specific ownership structure of large conglomerates. Utilizing an extensive database of analysts' reports provided by WiseFn(R) in Korea, we perform empirical analysis of potential relationship between earnings prediction and common ownership. We first analyzed the prediction bias index which tells how optimistic or friendly the analyst's prediction is compared to the realized earnings. It is shown that there exists no statistically significant relationship between the prediction bias and common ownership. This is a rather surprising result since it is observed that the frequency of positive prediction bias is higher with such ownership tie. Next, we analyzed the prediction accuracy index which shows how accurate the analyst's prediction is compared to the realized earnings regardless of its sign. It is also concluded that there is no significant association between the accuracy ofearnings prediction and special relationship. We interpret the results implying that market discipline based on reputation effect is working in Korean stock market in the sense that security companies do not seem to be influenced by an incentive to offer distorted information on affiliated firms. While many of the existing studies confirm the relationship between the ability of the analystand the accuracy of the analyst's prediction, these factors cannot be controlled in the above analysis due to the lack of relevant data. As an indirect way to examine the possibility that such relationship might have distorted the result, we perform an additional but identical analysis based on a sub-sample consisting only of reports by best analysts. The result also confirms the earlier conclusion that the common ownership structure does not affect the accuracy and bias of earnings prediction by the analyst.

• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.165-187
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• 2005

This paper tries to investigate the relationships among stock return volatility, time-varying risk premium and Korea Discount. Using Korean Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) return from January 4, 1980 to August 31, 2005, this study finds possible links between time-varying risk premium and Korea Discount. First of all, this study classifies Korean stock returns during the sample period by three regime-switching volatility period that is to say, low-volatile period medium-volatile period and highly-volatile period by estimating Markov-Switching ARCH model. During the highly volatile period of Korean stock return (09/01/1997-05/31/2001), the estimated time-varying unit risk premium from the jump-diffusion GARCH model was 0.3625, where as during the low volatile period (01/04/1980-l1/30/1985), the time-varying unit risk premium was estimated 0.0284 from the jump diffusion GARCH model, which was about thirteen times less than that. This study seems to find the evidence that highly volatile Korean stock market may induce large time-varying risk premium from the investors and this may lead to Korea discount.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.26-39
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• 2016

Korea's main manufacturing industries, which have led its economy for the past three decades, are faced with a serious downturn and loss of competitive advantages due to the current economic depression, China's rise, and the drop of oil prices. Korean business firms must adopt the paradigm shift in their value strategies, along with a government-led industrial restructuring in order to gain sustainable competitive advantages. Business firms allocate their limited resources between value creation and value appropriation, however, what effect does strategic emphasis on value creation versus value appropriation have on a business firm's financial performance? This paper empirically addresses this issue by examining the effect of shifts in strategic emphasis on stock return. Furthermore, this study examines appropriate choices of strategic emphasis to gain differential financial performance. The data set used in this regression analysis comes from the KISLINE database of NICE Information Service. The variables that form the basis of this analysis are stock return, ROA, and Strategic Emphasis [(advertising expenditures-R&D expenditures)/assets]. The interactive effect with situational factors regarding the firm and the type of technological environment in which the firm is operating was also analyzed. Our results show that investors acknowledge a shift of strategic emphasis as a sign of stock valuation. In comparison to US, Korean business firms have weak value creation capabilities in high-technology industries, and weak value appropriation capabilities in low-technology industries. This proves Korean firms are fast followers in the global market. Our findings suggest that Korean firms have to adopt a balanced value strategy, nurturing value creation and developing value appropriation for overcoming the current economic downturn and becoming a first mover in the dawn of "Industry 4.0."

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.187-204
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• 2016

Document classification based on emotional polarity has become a welcomed emerging task owing to the great explosion of data on the Web. In the big data age, there are too many information sources to refer to when making decisions. For example, when considering travel to a city, a person may search reviews from a search engine such as Google or social networking services (SNSs) such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. The emotional polarity of positive and negative reviews helps a user decide on whether or not to make a trip. Sentiment analysis of customer reviews has become an important research topic as datamining technology is widely accepted for text mining of the Web. Sentiment analysis has been used to classify documents through machine learning techniques, such as the decision tree, neural networks, and support vector machines (SVMs). is used to determine the attitude, position, and sensibility of people who write articles about various topics that are published on the Web. Regardless of the polarity of customer reviews, emotional reviews are very helpful materials for analyzing the opinions of customers through their reviews. Sentiment analysis helps with understanding what customers really want instantly through the help of automated text mining techniques. Sensitivity analysis utilizes text mining techniques on text on the Web to extract subjective information in the text for text analysis. Sensitivity analysis is utilized to determine the attitudes or positions of the person who wrote the article and presented their opinion about a particular topic. In this study, we developed a model that selects a hot topic from user posts at China's online stock forum by using the k-means algorithm and self-organizing map (SOM). In addition, we developed a detecting model to predict a hot topic by using machine learning techniques such as logit, the decision tree, and SVM. We employed sensitivity analysis to develop our model for the selection and detection of hot topics from China's online stock forum. The sensitivity analysis calculates a sentimental value from a document based on contrast and classification according to the polarity sentimental dictionary (positive or negative). The online stock forum was an attractive site because of its information about stock investment. Users post numerous texts about stock movement by analyzing the market according to government policy announcements, market reports, reports from research institutes on the economy, and even rumors. We divided the online forum's topics into 21 categories to utilize sentiment analysis. One hundred forty-four topics were selected among 21 categories at online forums about stock. The posts were crawled to build a positive and negative text database. We ultimately obtained 21,141 posts on 88 topics by preprocessing the text from March 2013 to February 2015. The interest index was defined to select the hot topics, and the k-means algorithm and SOM presented equivalent results with this data. We developed a decision tree model to detect hot topics with three algorithms: CHAID, CART, and C4.5. The results of CHAID were subpar compared to the others. We also employed SVM to detect the hot topics from negative data. The SVM models were trained with the radial basis function (RBF) kernel function by a grid search to detect the hot topics. The detection of hot topics by using sentiment analysis provides the latest trends and hot topics in the stock forum for investors so that they no longer need to search the vast amounts of information on the Web. Our proposed model is also helpful to rapidly determine customers' signals or attitudes towards government policy and firms' products and services.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.101-113
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• 2020

The study aims to investigate the existence of overconfidence bias in Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. This paper focuses on the Vietnam Stock Market and other two countries of ASEAN, namely Singapore and Thailand. Data was collected over the period from January 1, 2014 to December 31, 2018, daily returns for each of the securities. This paper uses the time series method, namely ADF test, Granger Causality and VAR approach to find evidences of the overconfidence effect in Vietnam in relation to some ASEAN markets. The results show similarities between the observed countries with slight variations, with focus on Vietnam market. In general concrete evidences of overconfidence were found in both Vietnamese and Singaporean markets, in which Singaporean investors show higher degree of overconfidence than Vietnamese investors. Overconfidence is not as clear in Thai market, however a direct causal link from increased returns to increased investor confidence was found. From the model deployed in the paper, there are reasons to conclude that Thai investors are under-confident. The findings of the study shed lights into the existence of overconfidence bias in Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore on a comparative basis, provide more insights and implications for future research in this new and rising field of research.

• Proceedings of the Safety Management and Science Conference
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• 2004.11a
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• pp.355-380
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• 2004

I test the hypothesis that the gradual diffusion of information across asset markets leads to cross-asset return predictability in Korea. Using thirty-six industry portfolios and the broad market index as our test assets, I establish several key results. First, a number of industries such as semiconductor, electronics, metal, and petroleum lead the stock market by up to one month. In contrast, the market, which is widely followed, only leads a few industries. Importantly, an industry's ability to lead the market is correlated with its propensity to forecast various indicators of economic activity such as industrial production growth. Consistent with our hypothesis, these findings indicate that the market reacts with a delay to information in industry returns about its fundamentals because information diffuses only gradually across asset markets. Traditional theories of asset pricing assume that investors have unlimited information-processing capacity. However, this assumption does not hold for many traders, even the most sophisticated ones. Many economists recognize that investors are better characterized as being only boundedly rational(see Shiller(2000), Sims(2201)). Even from casual observation, few traders can pay attention to all sources of information much less understand their impact on the prices of assets that they trade. Indeed, a large literature in psychology documents the extent to which even attention is a precious cognitive resource(see, eg., Kahneman(1973), Nisbett and Ross(1980), Fiske and Taylor(1991)). A number of papers have explored the implications of limited information- processing capacity for asset prices. I will review this literature in Section II. For instance, Merton(1987) develops a static model of multiple stocks in which investors only have information about a limited number of stocks and only trade those that they have information about. Related models of limited market participation include brennan(1975) and Allen and Gale(1994). As a result, stocks that are less recognized by investors have a smaller investor base(neglected stocks) and trade at a greater discount because of limited risk sharing. More recently, Hong and Stein(1999) develop a dynamic model of a single asset in which information gradually diffuses across the investment public and investors are unable to perform the rational expectations trick of extracting information from prices. Hong and Stein(1999). My hypothesis is that the gradual diffusion of information across asset markets leads to cross-asset return predictability. This hypothesis relies on two key assumptions. The first is that valuable information that originates in one asset reaches investors in other markets only with a lag, i.e. news travels slowly across markets. The second assumption is that because of limited information-processing capacity, many (though not necessarily all) investors may not pay attention or be able to extract the information from the asset prices of markets that they do not participate in. These two assumptions taken together leads to cross-asset return predictability. My hypothesis would appear to be a very plausible one for a few reasons. To begin with, as pointed out by Merton(1987) and the subsequent literature on segmented markets and limited market participation, few investors trade all assets. Put another way, limited participation is a pervasive feature of financial markets. Indeed, even among equity money managers, there is specialization along industries such as sector or market timing funds. Some reasons for this limited market participation include tax, regulatory or liquidity constraints. More plausibly, investors have to specialize because they have their hands full trying to understand the markets that they do participate in

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.377-386
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• 2014

This study analyzed how alternative investment goods would affect a market in a neighboring shopping area in order to provide parties involved in the investment market of this neighboring shopping area with standards which would help them when they try to make a reasonable determination. The study estimated forms and explanation power of the effects of a bid rate of a neighboring shopping area, and came up with those results as follows. Increases in the representative macro economic indicators, the composite stock price index and the fluctuation rate of land price, including the real estate business would have a positive influence on the market of the neighboring shopping area as playing a circumstantial evidence of market recovery and yet, the increase in interest rate, the alternative investment goods, would reduce the relative price-earnings ratio which would, eventually, negatively affect the charm of the investment in the market of the neighboring shopping area. The study, now, understands that housing with a feature of consumers' goods and neighboring shopping area with a feature of investment goods would not have great concern with each other as they are observed to be two different markets from an aspect of interactionism.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.161-196
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• 2010

This paper empirically investigates the impact of winning a service quality award on the market value in Korea. We estimates the mean "abnormal" change in the stock prices of sample firms when information of winning a service quality award was publicly announced. To access the validity of the research question, this paper employed collected 47 firms data that received the Korean Service Quality Awards so far. Event study methodology was used to analyze the effect of Korean service quality awards. The findings are as follows; The average abnormal returns on the event date are not significant at the 0.05 level which means that the receiving Korean Service Quality Awards has no influence on the firms' market value. On the other hand successive awarded firms have an increasing effect on the market value and it is significant at the 0.05 level. Furthermore, the results show that the factors of firm size such as firm's total assets are critical to vary the firms' abnormal returns. There might be some limitations in this study. The most obvious problem is the limitation of sample size. Although 518 sample cases were found during the period from 2000 to 2008, most of the cases were deleted according to the sample criteria. We are expecting the future research with more data and more precise results. Furthermore, our research consider the only two service award institutions even though there are several different service award authorities in Korea. It is needed to expand the research scope and range to adopt the various service award institutions for the future work.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.97-121
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• 2001

Until now, we have believed that one of advantages of cyber market is that it can virtually display and sell goods because it does not necessary maintain expensive physical shops and inventories. But, in a highly competitive environment, business model that does away with goods in stock must be modified. As we know in the case of AMAZON, leading companies already consider merchandise management as a critical success factor in their business model. That is, a solution to compete against one's competitors in a highly competitive environment is merchandise management as in the traditional retail market. Cyber market has not only past sales data but also web log data before sales data that contains information of path that customer search and purchase on cyber market as compared with traditional retail market. So if we can correctly analyze the characteristics of before sales patterns using web log data, we can better prepare for the potential customers and effectively manage inventories and merchandises. We introduce a systematic analysis method to extract useful data for merchandise management - demand forecasting, evaluating & selecting - using web mining that is the application of data mining techniques to the World Wide Web. We use various techniques of web mining such as clustering, mining association rules, mining sequential patterns.