• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.119-138
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• 2016

Since the Industrial Revolution, which made the mass production and mass distribution of standardized goods possible, machine-made (manufactured) products have accounted for the majority of the market. However, in recent years, the phenomenon of purchasing even more expensive handmade products has become a noticeable trend as consumers have started to acknowledge the value of handmade products, such as the craftsman's commitment, belief in their quality and scarcity, and the sense of self-esteem from having them,. Consumer interest in these handmade products has shown explosive growth and has been coupled with the recent development of three-dimensional (3D) printing technologies. Etsy.com is the world's largest online handmade platform. It is no different from any other online platform; it provides an online market where buyers and sellers virtually meet to share information and transact business. However, Etsy.com is different in that shops within this platform only deal with handmade products in a variety of categories, ranging from jewelry to toys. Since its establishment in 2005, despite being limited to handmade products, Etsy.com has enjoyed rapid growth in membership, transaction volume, and revenue. Most recently in April 2015, it raised funds through an initial public offering (IPO) of more than 1.8 billion USD, which demonstrates the huge potential of online handmade platforms. After the success of Etsy.com, various types of online handmade platforms such as Handmade at Amazon, ArtFire, DaWanda, and Craft is ART have emerged and are now competing with each other, at the same time, which has increased the size of the market. According to Deloitte's 2015 holiday survey on which types of gifts the respondents plan to buy during the holiday season, about 16% of U.S. consumers chose "homemade or craft items (e.g., Etsy purchase)," which was the same rate as those for the computer game and shoes categories. This indicates that consumer interests in online handmade platforms will continue to rise in the future. However, this high interest in the market for handmade products and their platforms has not yet led to academic research. Most extant studies have only focused on machine-made products and intelligent services for them. This indicates a lack of studies on handmade products and their intelligent services on virtual platforms. Therefore, this study used signaling theory and prior research on the effects of sellers' characteristics on their performance (e.g., total sales and price premiums) in the buyer-seller relationship to identify the key influencing e-Image factors (e.g., reputation, size, information sharing, and length of relationship). Then, their impacts on the performance of shops within the online handmade platform were empirically examined; the dataset was collected from Etsy.com through the application of web harvesting technology. The results from the structural equation modeling revealed that the reputation, size, and information sharing have significant effects on the total sales, while the reputation and length of relationship influence price premiums. This study extended the online platform research into online handmade platform research by identifying key influencing e-Image factors on within-platform shop's total sales and price premiums based on signaling theory and then performed a statistical investigation. These findings are expected to be a stepping stone for future studies on intelligent online handmade services as well as handmade products themselves. Furthermore, the findings of the study provide online handmade platform operators with practical guidelines on how to implement intelligent online handmade services. They should also help shop managers build their marketing strategies in a more specific and effective manner by suggesting key influencing e-Image factors. The results of this study should contribute to the vitalization of intelligent online handmade services by providing clues on how to maximize within-platform shops' total sales and price premiums.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.93-110
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• 2015

The recommender system is a system which recommends products to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Based on automated information filtering technology, various recommender systems have been developed. Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most successful recommendation algorithms, has been applied in a number of different domains such as recommending Web pages, books, movies, music and products. But, it has been known that CF has a critical shortcoming. CF finds neighbors whose preferences are like those of the target customer and recommends products those customers have most liked. Thus, CF works properly only when there's a sufficient number of ratings on common product from customers. When there's a shortage of customer ratings, CF makes the formation of a neighborhood inaccurate, thereby resulting in poor recommendations. To improve the performance of CF based recommender systems, most of the related studies have been focused on the development of novel algorithms under the assumption of using a single profile, which is created from user's rating information for items, purchase transactions, or Web access logs. With the advent of big data, companies got to collect more data and to use a variety of information with big size. So, many companies recognize it very importantly to utilize big data because it makes companies to improve their competitiveness and to create new value. In particular, on the rise is the issue of utilizing personal big data in the recommender system. It is why personal big data facilitate more accurate identification of the preferences or behaviors of users. The proposed recommendation methodology is as follows: First, multimodal user profiles are created from personal big data in order to grasp the preferences and behavior of users from various viewpoints. We derive five user profiles based on the personal information such as rating, site preference, demographic, Internet usage, and topic in text. Next, the similarity between users is calculated based on the profiles and then neighbors of users are found from the results. One of three ensemble approaches is applied to calculate the similarity. Each ensemble approach uses the similarity of combined profile, the average similarity of each profile, and the weighted average similarity of each profile, respectively. Finally, the products that people among the neighborhood prefer most to are recommended to the target users. For the experiments, we used the demographic data and a very large volume of Web log transaction for 5,000 panel users of a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of Web sites. R and SAS E-miner was used to implement the proposed recommender system and to conduct the topic analysis using the keyword search, respectively. To evaluate the recommendation performance, we used 60% of data for training and 40% of data for test. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. A widely used combination metric called F1 metric that gives equal weight to both recall and precision was employed for our evaluation. As the results of evaluation, the proposed methodology achieved the significant improvement over the single profile based CF algorithm. In particular, the ensemble approach using weighted average similarity shows the highest performance. That is, the rate of improvement in F1 is 16.9 percent for the ensemble approach using weighted average similarity and 8.1 percent for the ensemble approach using average similarity of each profile. From these results, we conclude that the multimodal profile ensemble approach is a viable solution to the problems encountered when there's a shortage of customer ratings. This study has significance in suggesting what kind of information could we use to create profile in the environment of big data and how could we combine and utilize them effectively. However, our methodology should be further studied to consider for its real-world application. We need to compare the differences in recommendation accuracy by applying the proposed method to different recommendation algorithms and then to identify which combination of them would show the best performance.

• 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.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.157-175
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• 2012

It is difficult to evaluate the performance of process innovation of e-procurement which has large scale and complex processes. The existing evaluation methods for measuring the effects of process innovation have been mainly done with statistically quantitative methods by analyzing operational data or with qualitative methods by conducting surveys and interviews. However, these methods have some limitations to evaluate the effects because the performance evaluation of e-procurement process innovation should consider the interactions among participants who are active either directly or indirectly through the processes. This study considers the e-procurement process as a complex system and develops a simulation model based on MAS(Multi-Agent System) to evaluate the effects of e-procurement process innovation. Multi-agent based simulation allows observing interaction patterns of objects in virtual world through relationship among objects and their behavioral mechanism. Agent-based simulation is suitable especially for complex business problems. In this study, we used Netlogo Version 4.1.3 as a MAS simulation tool which was developed in Northwestern University. To do this, we developed a interaction model of agents in MAS environment. We defined process agents and task agents, and assigned their behavioral characteristics. The developed simulation model was applied to G2B system (KONEPS: Korea ON-line E-Procurement System) of Public Procurement Service (PPS) in Korea and used to evaluate the innovation effects of the G2B system. KONEPS is a successfully established e-procurement system started in the year 2002. KONEPS is a representative e-Procurement system which integrates characteristics of e-commerce into government for business procurement activities. KONEPS deserves the international recognition considering the annual transaction volume of 56 billion dollars, daily exchanges of electronic documents, users consisted of 121,000 suppliers and 37,000 public organizations, and the 4.5 billion dollars of cost saving. For the simulation, we analyzed the e-procurement of process of KONEPS into eight sub processes such as 'process 1: search products and acquisition of proposal', 'process 2 : review the methods of contracts and item features', 'process 3 : a notice of bid', 'process 4 : registration and confirmation of qualification', 'process 5 : bidding', 'process 6 : a screening test', 'process 7 : contracts', and 'process 8 : invoice and payment'. For the parameter settings of the agents behavior, we collected some data from the transactional database of PPS and some information by conducting a survey. The used data for the simulation are 'participants (government organizations, local government organizations and public institutions)', 'the number of bidding per year', 'the number of total contracts', 'the number of shopping mall transactions', 'the rate of contracts between bidding and shopping mall', 'the successful bidding ratio', and the estimated time for each process. The comparison was done for the difference of time consumption between 'before the innovation (As-was)' and 'after the innovation (As-is).' The results showed that there were productivity improvements in every eight sub processes. The decrease ratio of 'average number of task processing' was 92.7% and the decrease ratio of 'average time of task processing' was 95.4% in entire processes when we use G2B system comparing to the conventional method. Also, this study found that the process innovation effect will be enhanced if the task process related to the 'contract' can be improved. This study shows the usability and possibility of using MAS in process innovation evaluation and its modeling.