• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.115-130
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• 2011

Many online stores bring features that can build trust in their customers. More so, the number of products or content services on online stores has been increasing rapidly. Hence, personalization on online stores is considered to be an important technology to companies and customers. Recommender systems that provide favorable products and customer product reviews to users are the most commonly used features in this purpose. There are many studies to that investigated the relationship between social presence as an antecedent of trust and provision of recommender systems or customer product reviews. Many online stores have made efforts to increase perceived social presence of their customers through customer reviews, recommender systems, and analyzing associations among products. Primarily because social presence can increase customer trust or reuse intention for online stores. However, there were few studies that investigated the interactions between recommendation type, product type and provision of customer product reviews on social presence. Therefore, one of the purposes of this study is to identify the effects of personalized recommender systems and compare the role of customer reviews with product types. This study performed an experiment to see these interactions. Experimental web pages were developed with $2{\times}2$ factorial setting based on how to provide social presence to users with customer reviews and two product types such as hedonic and utilitarian. The hedonic type was a ringtone chosen from Nate.com while the utilitarian was a TOEIC study aid book selected from Yes24.com. To conduct the experiment, web based experiments were conducted for the participants who have been shopping on the online stores. Participants were a total of 240 and 30% of the participants had the chance of getting the presents. We found out that social presence increased for hedonic products when personalized recommendations were given compared to non.personalized recommendations. Although providing customer reviews for two product types did not significantly increase social presence, provision of customer product reviews for hedonic (ringtone) increased perceived social presence. Otherwise, provision of customer product reviews could not increase social presence when the systems recommend utilitarian products (TOEIC study.aid books). Therefore, it appears that the effects of increasing perceived social presence with customer reviews have a difference for product types. In short, the role of customer reviews could be different based on which product types were considered by customers when they are making a decision related to purchasing on the online stores. Additionally, there were no differences for increasing perceived social presence when providing customer reviews. Our participants might have focused on how recommendations had been provided and what products were recommended because our developed systems were providing recommendations after participants rating their preferences. Thus, the effects of customer reviews could appear more clearly if our participants had actual purchase opportunity for the recommendations. Personalized recommender systems can increase social presence of customers more than nonpersonalized recommender systems by using user preference. Online stores could find out how they can increase perceived social presence and satisfaction of their customers when customers want to find the proper products with recommender systems and customer reviews. In addition, the role of customer reviews of the personalized recommendations can be different based on types of the recommended products. Even if this study conducted two product types such as hedonic and utilitarian, the results revealed that customer reviews for hedonic increased social presence of customers more than customer reviews for utilitarian. Thus, online stores need to consider the role of providing customer reviews with highly personalized information based on their product types when they develop the personalized recommender systems.

• 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.