• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.61-101
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• 2014

This study investigates when and how disagreements in online customer ratings prompt more favorable product evaluations. Among the three metrics of volume, valence, and variance that feature in the research on online customer ratings, volume and valence have exhibited consistently positive patterns in their effects on product sales or evaluations (e.g., Dellarocas, Zhang, and Awad 2007; Liu 2006). Ratings variance, or the degree of disagreement among reviewers, however, has shown rather mixed results, with some studies reporting positive effects on product sales (e.g., Clement, Proppe, and Rott 2007) while others finding negative effects on product evaluations (e.g., Zhu and Zhang 2010). This study aims to resolve these contradictory findings by introducing preference heterogeneity as a possible moderator and causal attribution as a mediator to account for the moderating effect. The main proposition of this study is that when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high, a disagreement in ratings is attributed more to reviewers' different preferences than to unreliable product quality, which in turn prompts better quality evaluations of a product. Because disagreements mostly result from differences in reviewers' tastes or the low reliability of a product's quality (Mizerski 1982; Sen and Lerman 2007), a greater level of attribution to reviewer tastes can mitigate the negative effect of disagreement on product evaluations. Specifically, if consumers infer that reviewers' heterogeneous preferences result in subjectively different experiences and thereby highly diverse ratings, they would not disregard the overall quality of a product. However, if consumers infer that reviewers' preferences are quite homogeneous and thus the low reliability of the product quality contributes to such disagreements, they would discount the overall product quality. Therefore, consumers would respond more favorably to disagreements in ratings when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high rather than low. This study furthermore extends this prediction to the various levels of average ratings. The heuristicsystematic processing model so far indicates that the engagement in effortful systematic processing occurs only when sufficient motivation is present (Hann et al. 2007; Maheswaran and Chaiken 1991; Martin and Davies 1998). One of the key factors affecting this motivation is the aspiration level of the decision maker. Only under conditions that meet or exceed his aspiration level does he tend to engage in systematic processing (Patzelt and Shepherd 2008; Stephanous and Sage 1987). Therefore, systematic causal attribution processing regarding ratings variance is likely more activated when the average rating is high enough to meet the aspiration level than when it is too low to meet it. Considering that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity occurs through the mediation of causal attribution, this greater activation of causal attribution in high versus low average ratings would lead to more pronounced interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity in high versus low average ratings. Overall, this study proposes that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high as compared to when it is low. Two laboratory studies lend support to these predictions. Study 1 reveals that participants exposed to a high-preference heterogeneity book title (i.e., a novel) attributed disagreement in ratings more to reviewers' tastes, and thereby more favorably evaluated books with such ratings, compared to those exposed to a low-preference heterogeneity title (i.e., an English listening practice book). Study 2 then extended these findings to the various levels of average ratings and found that this greater preference for disagreement options under high preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high compared to when it is low. This study makes an important theoretical contribution to the online customer ratings literature by showing that preference heterogeneity serves as a key moderator of the effect of ratings variance on product evaluations and that causal attribution acts as a mediator of this moderation effect. A more comprehensive picture of the interplay among ratings variance, preference heterogeneity, and average ratings is also provided by revealing that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity varies as a function of the average rating. In addition, this work provides some significant managerial implications for marketers in terms of how they manage word of mouth. Because a lack of consensus creates some uncertainty and anxiety over the given information, consumers experience a psychological burden regarding their choice of a product when ratings show disagreement. The results of this study offer a way to address this problem. By explicitly clarifying that there are many more differences in tastes among reviewers than expected, marketers can allow consumers to speculate that differing tastes of reviewers rather than an uncertain or poor product quality contribute to such conflicts in ratings. Thus, when fierce disagreements are observed in the WOM arena, marketers are advised to communicate to consumers that diverse, rather than uniform, tastes govern reviews and evaluations of products.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.281-292
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• 1999

This study was designed to construct a model that predicts the health promoting behavior of the Korean elderly. Data were collected by self-reported questionaires from 254 Korean elderly in seoul, from June 1 to July 15, 1998. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and correlational analysis using pc-SAS program. The Linear Structural Modeling(LISREL) 8.0 program was used to find the best fit model which predicts causal relationships of variables. The overall fit of the hypothetical model to the data was moderate［X$^2$＝249.83(df＝83, p＝.00), RMR＝.07, GFI＝.90, NNFI＝.92, NFI ＝.91］. The predictable variables of health promoting behavior of the Korean elderly were social activity. social support. self-integrity and helplessness except the perceived health status. These variables explained 17.1% of health promoting behavior of the Korean elderly.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.188-193
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• 2002

Various research methods have been used in science depending on the various contexts. This implies that certain methods or inferences may be more frequently used in earth science. The purpose of the study are to explore the contexts of earth science, and the inferences frequently used in earth science. The context earth science research is quite different from that of other areas of natural science in terms of its time scale, space scale, accessibility, complexity, and controllability. The purpose of earth science research is twofold: historical and causal. The inferences frequently used in earth science are abduction and prediction. Abductive inferences go from the resulting state to controlling state. Predictive inferences go from hypothesis to expected data.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.1-8
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• 2021

Deep learning is one of the most widely accepted methods for the forecasting of time series data which have the complexity and non-linear behavior. In this paper, we investigate the modification of a state-of-art WaveNet deep learning architecture and walk forward validation (WFV) in order to forecast electric power consumption data 24-hour-ahead. WaveNet originally designed for raw audio uses 1D dilated causal convolution for long-term information. First of all, we propose a modified version of WaveNet which activates real numbers instead of coded integers. Second, this paper provides with the training process with tuning of major hyper-parameters (i.e., input length, batch size, number of WaveNet blocks, dilation rates, and learning rate scheduler). Finally, performance evaluation results show that the prediction methodology based on WFV performs better than on the traditional holdout validation.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.207-228
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• 2007

Measuring Information Technology(IT) organizations' activities have been limited to mainly measure financial indicators for a long time. However, according to the multifarious functions of Information System, a number of researches have been done for the new trends on measurement methodologies that come with financial measurement as well as new measurement methods. Especially, the researches on IT Balanced Scorecard(BSC), concept from BSC measuring IT activities have been done as well in recent years. BSC provides more advantages than only integration of non-financial measures in a performance measurement system. The core of BSC rests on the cause-and-effect relationships between measures to allow prediction of value chain performance measures to allow prediction of value chain performance measures, communication, and realization of the corporate strategy and incentive controlled actions. More recently, BSC proponents have focused on the need to tie measures together into a causal chain of performance, and to test the validity of these hypothesized effects to guide the development of strategy. Kaplan and Norton[2001] argue that one of the primary benefits of the balanced scorecard is its use in gauging the success of strategy. Norreklit[2000] insist that the cause-and-effect chain is central to the balanced scorecard. The cause-and-effect chain is also central to the IT BSC. However, prior researches on relationship between information system and enterprise strategies as well as connection between various IT performance measurement indicators are not so much studied. Ittner et al.[2003] report that 77% of all surveyed companies with an implemented BSC place no or only little interest on soundly modeled cause-and-effect relationships despite of the importance of cause-and-effect chains as an integral part of BSC. This shortcoming can be explained with one theoretical and one practical reason[Blumenberg and Hinz, 2006]. From a theoretical point of view, causalities within the BSC method and their application are only vaguely described by Kaplan and Norton. From a practical consideration, modeling corporate causalities is a complex task due to tedious data acquisition and following reliability maintenance. However, cause-and effect relationships are an essential part of BSCs because they differentiate performance measurement systems like BSCs from simple key performance indicator(KPI) lists. KPI lists present an ad-hoc collection of measures to managers but do not allow for a comprehensive view on corporate performance. Instead, performance measurement system like BSCs tries to model the relationships of the underlying value chain in cause-and-effect relationships. Therefore, to overcome the deficiencies of causal modeling in IT BSC, sound and robust causal modeling approaches are required in theory as well as in practice for offering a solution. The propose of this study is to suggest critical success factors(CSFs) and KPIs for measuring performance for IT organizations and empirically validate the casual relationships between those CSFs. For this purpose, we define four perspectives of BSC for IT organizations according to Van Grembergen's study[2000] as follows. The Future Orientation perspective represents the human and technology resources needed by IT to deliver its services. The Operational Excellence perspective represents the IT processes employed to develop and deliver the applications. The User Orientation perspective represents the user evaluation of IT. The Business Contribution perspective captures the business value of the IT investments. Each of these perspectives has to be translated into corresponding metrics and measures that assess the current situations. This study suggests 12 CSFs for IT BSC based on the previous IT BSC's studies and COBIT 4.1. These CSFs consist of 51 KPIs. We defines the cause-and-effect relationships among BSC CSFs for IT Organizations as follows. The Future Orientation perspective will have positive effects on the Operational Excellence perspective. Then the Operational Excellence perspective will have positive effects on the User Orientation perspective. Finally, the User Orientation perspective will have positive effects on the Business Contribution perspective. This research tests the validity of these hypothesized casual effects and the sub-hypothesized causal relationships. For the purpose, we used the Partial Least Squares approach to Structural Equation Modeling(or PLS Path Modeling) for analyzing multiple IT BSC CSFs. The PLS path modeling has special abilities that make it more appropriate than other techniques, such as multiple regression and LISREL, when analyzing small sample sizes. Recently the use of PLS path modeling has been gaining interests and use among IS researchers in recent years because of its ability to model latent constructs under conditions of nonormality and with small to medium sample sizes(Chin et al., 2003). The empirical results of our study using PLS path modeling show that the casual effects in IT BSC significantly exist partially in our hypotheses.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.19-43
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• 2016

This study examines the causes of the Asian exchange rate crisis and compares it to the European Monetary System crisis. In 1997, emerging countries in Asia experienced financial crises. Previously in 1992, currencies in the European Monetary System had undergone the same experience. This was followed by Mexico in 1994. The objective of this paper lies in the generation of useful insights from these crises. This research presents a comparison of South Korea, United Kingdom and Mexico, and then compares three different models for prediction. Previous studies of economic crisis focused largely on the manual construction of causal models using linear techniques. However, the weakness of such models stems from the prevalence of nonlinear factors in reality. This paper uses a structural equation model to analyze the causes, followed by a neural network model to circumvent the linear model's weaknesses. The models are examined in the context of predicting exchange rates In this paper, data were quarterly ones, and Consumer Price Index, Gross Domestic Product, Interest Rate, Stock Index, Current Account, Foreign Reserves were independent variables for the prediction. However, time periods of each country's data are different. Lisrel is an emerging method and as such requires a fresh approach to financial crisis prediction model design, along with the flexibility to accommodate unexpected change. This paper indicates the neural network model has the greater prediction performance in Korea, Mexico, and United Kingdom. However, in Korea, the multiple regression shows the better performance. In Mexico, the multiple regression is almost indifferent to the Lisrel. Although Lisrel doesn't show the significant performance, the refined model is expected to show the better result. The structural model in this paper should contain the psychological factor and other invisible areas in the future work. The reason of the low hit ratio is that the alternative model in this paper uses only the financial market data. Thus, we cannot consider the other important part. Korea's hit ratio is lower than that of United Kingdom. So, there must be the other construct that affects the financial market. So does Mexico. However, the United Kingdom's financial market is more influenced and explained by the financial factors than Korea and Mexico.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.307-332
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• 2022

One of the most intensively conducted research areas in business application study is a bankruptcy prediction model, a representative classification problem related to loan lending, investment decision making, and profitability to financial institutions. Many research demonstrated outstanding performance for bankruptcy prediction models using artificial intelligence techniques. However, since most machine learning algorithms are "black-box," AI has been identified as a prominent research topic for providing users with an explanation. Although there are many different approaches for explanations, this study focuses on explaining a bankruptcy prediction model using a counterfactual example. Users can obtain desired output from the model by using a counterfactual-based explanation, which provides an alternative case. This study introduces a counterfactual generation technique based on a genetic algorithm (GA) that leverages both domain knowledge (i.e., causal feasibility) and feature importance from a black-box model along with other critical counterfactual variables, including proximity, distribution, and sparsity. The proposed method was evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively to measure the quality and the validity.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.34 no.5
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• pp.71-92
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• 2015

This study analyzes the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities on financial performances using Bayesian Network. The research tries to overcome the issues of the uniform assumption of a linear function between financial performance and CSR activities in multiple regression analysis widely used in previous studies. It is required to infer a causal relationship between activities of CSR which have an impact on the financial performances. Identifying the relationship would empower the firms to improve their financial performance by informing the decision makers about the different CSR activities that influence the financial performance of the firms. This research proposes General Bayesian Network (GBN) and presents Markov Blanket induced from GBN. It is empirically demonstrated that all the proposals presented in this study are statistically significant by the results of the research conducted by Korean Economic Justice Institute (KEJI) under Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice (CCEJ) which investigated approximately 200 companies in Korea based on Korean Economic Justice Institute Index (KEJI index) from 2005 to 2011. The Bayesian Network to effectively infer the properties affecting financial performances through the probabilistic causal relationship. Moreover, I found that there is a causal relationship among CSR activities variable; that is Environment protection is related to Customer protection, Employee satisfaction, and firm size; Soundness is related to Total CSR Evaluation Score, Debt-Assets Ratio. Though the what-if analysis, I suggest to the sensitive factor among the explanatory variables.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.280-292
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• 2015

Purpose: In this study a system dynamics methodology was used to identify correlation and nonlinear feedback structure among factors affecting unplanned extubation (UE) of ICU patients and to construct and verify a simulation model. Methods: Factors affecting UE were identified through a theoretical background established by reviewing literature and preceding studies and referencing various statistical data. Related variables were decided through verification of content validity by an expert group. A causal loop diagram (CLD) was made based on the variables. Stock & Flow modeling using Vensim PLE Plus Version 6.0b was performed to establish a model for UE. Results: Based on the literature review and expert verification, 18 variables associated with UE were identified and CLD was prepared. From the prepared CLD, a model was developed by converting to the Stock & Flow Diagram. Results of the simulation showed that patient stress, patient in an agitated state, restraint application, patient movability, and individual intensive nursing were variables giving the greatest effect to UE probability. To verify agreement of the UE model with real situations, simulation with 5 cases was performed. Equation check and sensitivity analysis on TIME STEP were executed to validate model integrity. Conclusion: Results show that identification of a proper model enables prediction of UE probability. This prediction allows for adjustment of related factors, and provides basic data do develop nursing interventions to decrease UE.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.697-712
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• 2010

This paper is concerned with the statistical analysis and development of stochastic models for the demand for life insurance policy loans. For these, firstly the characteristics of the regression trend, periodicity and dependence of the monthly demand for life insurance policy loans are investigated by a statistical analysis of the monthly demand data for the years 1999 through 2008. Secondly, the causal relationships between the demand for life insurance policy loans and the economic variables including unemployment rate and inflation rate for the period are investigated. The results show that inflation rate is main factor influencing policy loan demands. The overall evidence, however, failed to establish unidirectional causality relationships between the demand series and the other variables under study. Finally, based on these, univariate time series model and transfer function model where the demand series is related to one input series are derived, respectively, for the prediction of the demand for life insurance policy loans. A statistical procedure for using the model to predict the demand for life insurance policy loans is also proposed.