Financial technology (FinTech) is an emerging financial service sector include innovations in financial literacy and investment, retail banking, education, and crypto-currencies like bitcoin. One of the crucial branch of financial technology-third-party payment (TPP) is undergoing rapid growth, with online/mobile systems replacing offline financial systems. System quality and user attitudes are key perceptions driving third-party payment usage, the importance of these perceptions, however, may be different with countries as users' thinking varies from country to country. Thus, the purpose of this study is to elaborate how factors differ from China to Korea by drawing on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2). Additionally, this study also aims to propose a multi-attribute evaluation of the third-party online payment system based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP), fuzzy sets and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), to examine the relative importance of the perceptions influencing new technology adoption intention. The results showed that the price value has the most significant influence on Chinese perceptions, while the perceived credibility has the most significant effect on Korean perceptions. Sub-criteria also performs different results to Chinese and Korean third-party online payment system.
The purpose of this research is to construct research framework for international franchising based on existing literature and to identify research components in the framework. Franchise can be defined as management styles that allow franchisee use various management assets of franchisor in order to make or sell product or service. It can be divided into product distribution franchise that is designed to sell products and business format franchise that is designed for running it as business whatever its form is. International franchising can be defined as a way of internationalization of franchisor to foreign country by providing its business format or package to franchisee of host country. International franchising is growing fast for last four decades but academic research on this is quite limited. Especially in Korea, research about international franchising is carried out on by case study format with single case or empirical study format with survey based on domestic franchise theory. Therefore, this paper tries to review existing literature on international franchising research, providing research framework, and then stimulating new research on this field. International franchising research components include motives and environmental factors for decision of expanding to international franchising, entrance modes and development plan for international franchising, contracts and management strategy of international franchising, and various performance measures from different perspectives. First, motives of international franchising are fee collection from franchisee. Also it provides easier way to expanding to foreign country. The other motives including increase total sales volume, occupying better strategic position, getting quality resources, and improving efficiency. Environmental factors that facilitating international franchising encompasses economic condition, trend, and legal or political factors in host and/or home countries. In addition, control power and risk management capability of franchisor plays critical role in successful franchising contract. Final decision to enter foreign country via franchising is determined by numerous factors like history, size, growth, competitiveness, management system, bonding capability, industry characteristics of franchisor. After deciding to enter into foreign country, franchisor needs to set entrance modes of international franchising. Within contractual mode, there are master franchising and area developing franchising, licensing, direct franchising, and joint venture. Theories about entrance mode selection contain concepts of efficiency, knowledge-based approach, competence-based approach, agent theory, and governance cost. The next step after entrance decision is operation strategy. Operation strategy starts with selecting a target city and a target country for franchising. In order to finding, screening targets, franchisor needs to collect information about candidates. Critical information includes brand patent, commercial laws, regulations, market conditions, country risk, and industry analysis. After selecting a target city in target country, franchisor needs to select franchisee, in other word, partner. The first important criteria for selecting partners are financial credibility and capability, possession of real estate. And cultural similarity and knowledge about franchisor and/or home country are also recognized as critical criteria. The most important element in operating strategy is legal document between franchisor and franchisee with home and host countries. Terms and conditions in legal documents give objective information about characteristics of franchising agreement for academic research. Legal documents have definitions of terminology, territory and exclusivity, agreement of term, initial fee, continuing fees, clearing currency, and rights about sub-franchising. Also, legal documents could have terms about softer elements like training program and operation manual. And harder elements like law competent court and terms of expiration. Next element in operating strategy is about product and service. Especially for business format franchising, product/service deliverable, benefit communicators, system identifiers (architectural features), and format facilitators are listed for product/service strategic elements. Another important decision on product/service is standardization vs. customization. The rationale behind standardization is cost reduction, efficiency, consistency, image congruence, brand awareness, and competitiveness on price. Also standardization enables large scale R&D and innovative change in management style. Another element in operating strategy is control management. The simple way to control franchise contract is relying on legal terms, contractual control system. There are other control systems, administrative control system and ethical control system. Contractual control system is a coercive source of power, but franchisor usually doesn't want to use legal power since it doesn't help to build up positive relationship. Instead, self-regulation is widely used. Administrative control system uses control mechanism from ordinary work relationship. Its main component is supporting activities to franchisee and communication method. For example, franchisor provides advertising, training, manual, and delivery, then franchisee follows franchisor's direction. Another component is building franchisor's brand power. The last research element is performance factor of international franchising. Performance elements can be divided into franchisor's performance and franchisee's performance. The conceptual performance measures of franchisor are simple but not easy to obtain objectively. They are profit, sale, cost, experience, and brand power. The performance measures of franchisee are mostly about benefits of host country. They contain small business development, promotion of employment, introduction of new business model, and level up technology status. There are indirect benefits, like increase of tax, refinement of corporate citizenship, regional economic clustering, and improvement of international balance. In addition to those, host country gets socio-cultural change other than economic effects. It includes demographic change, social trend, customer value change, social communication, and social globalization. Sometimes it is called as westernization or McDonaldization of society. In addition, the paper reviews on theories that have been frequently applied to international franchising research, such as agent theory, resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning theory, and international expansion theories. Resource based theory is used in strategic decision based on resources, like decision about entrance and cooperation depending on resources of franchisee and franchisor. Transaction cost theory can be applied in determination of mutual trust or satisfaction of franchising players. Agent theory tries to explain strategic decision for reducing problem caused by utilizing agent, for example research on control system in franchising agreements. Organizational Learning theory is relatively new in franchising research. It assumes organization tries to maximize performance and learning of organization. In addition, Internalization theory advocates strategic decision of direct investment for removing inefficiency of market transaction and is applied in research on terms of contract. And oligopolistic competition theory is used to explain various entry modes for international expansion. Competency theory support strategic decision of utilizing key competitive advantage. Furthermore, research methodologies including qualitative and quantitative methodologies are suggested for more rigorous international franchising research. Quantitative research needs more real data other than survey data which is usually respondent's judgment. In order to verify theory more rigorously, research based on real data is essential. However, real quantitative data is quite hard to get. The qualitative research other than single case study is also highly recommended. Since international franchising has limited number of applications, scientific research based on grounded theory and ethnography study can be used. Scientific case study is differentiated with single case study on its data collection method and analysis method. The key concept is triangulation in measurement, logical coding and comparison. Finally, it provides overall research direction for international franchising after summarizing research trend in Korea. International franchising research in Korea has two different types, one is for studying Korean franchisor going overseas and the other is for Korean franchisee of foreign franchisor. Among research on Korean franchisor, two common patterns are observed. First of all, they usually deal with success story of one franchisor. The other common pattern is that they focus on same industry and country. Therefore, international franchise research needs to extend their focus to broader subjects with scientific research methodology as well as development of new theory.
This study is aiming at identifying the foreward and backward lingkage effects of the farm land base development project. Korean Government has continuously carried out farmland base development projets including the integrated agricultural development projects. large and medium scale irrigation projects and the comprehensive development of the four big river basin including tidal land reclamation and estuary dam construction for the all weather farming since 1962. the starting year of the five year economic development plans. Consequently the irrigation rate of paddy fields in Korea reached to 75% in 1998 and to escalate the irrigation rate, the Government had procured heavy investment fund from IBRD. IMF and OECF etc. To cope with the agricultural problems like trade liberalization in accordance with WTO policy, the government has tried to solve such problems as new farmland base development policy, preservation of the farmland and expansion of farmland to meet self-sufficiency of foods in the future. Especially, farmland base development projects have been challanged to environmental and ecological problems in evaluating economic benefits and costs where the value of non-market goods have not been included in those. Up to data, in evaluating benefits and costs of the projects, farmland base development projects have been confined to direct incremental value of farm products and it's related costs. Therefore the projects'efficiency as a decision making criteria has shown the low level of economic efficiencies. In estimating economic efficiencies including Leontiefs input-output analysis of the projects could not be founded in Korea at present. Accordingly this study is aimed at achieving and identifying the following objectives. (1) To identify the problems related to the financial supports of the Government in implementing the proposed projects. (2) To estimated backward and foreward linkage effects of the proposed project from the view point of national economy as a whole. To achieve the objectives, Hwangrak benefited area with reservoir which is located in Seosan-haemi Disticts, Chungnam Province were selected as a case study. The main results of the study are summarized as follows : a. The present value of investment and O & M cost were amounted to 3,510million won and the present value of the value added in related industries was estimated at 5.913million won for the period of economic life of 70 years. b. The total discounted value of farm products in the concerned industries derived by the project was estimated at 10,495million won and the foreward and backward linkage effects of the project were amounted to 6,760 and 5,126million won respectively. c. The total number of employment opportunities derived from the related industries for the period of project life were 3,136 man/year. d. Farmland base development projects were showed that the backward linkage effects estimated by index of the sensitivity dispersion were larger than the forward linkage effect estimated by index of the power of dispersion. On the other hand, the forward linkage effect of rice production value during project life was larger than the backward linkage effect e. The rate of creation of new job opportunity by means of implementing civil engineering works were shown high in itself rather than any other fields. and the linkage effects of production of the project investment were mainly derived from the metal and non-metal fields. f. According to the industrial linkage effect analysis, farmland base development projects were identified economically feasible from the view point of national economy as a whole even though the economic efficiencies of the project was outstandingly decreased owing to delaying construction period and increasing project costs.
Today's financial institutions usually take environmental issues seriously into consideration as they could not evade lender liability in an increasing number of cases. On the international scene, a brand-new concept of the "Equator Principles" in the New Millenium has driven more and more international banks to adopt these Principles in project financing. Sustainable development has been a key word in understanding new trends of the governments, financial institutions, corporations and civic groups in the 21st century. The Equator Principles are a set of voluntary environmental and social guidelines for sustainable finance. These Principles commit bank officers to avoid financial support to projects that fail to meet these guidelines. The Principles were conceived in 2002 on an initiative of the International Finance Corporation(IFC), and launched in June 2003. Since then, dozens of major banks, accounting for up to 80 percent of project loan market, have adopted the Principles. Accordingly, the Principles have become the de facto standard for all banks and investors on how to deal with potential social and environmental issues of projects to be financed. Compliance with the Equator Principles facilitates for endorsing banks to participate in the syndicated loan and help them to manage the risks associated with large-scale projects. The Equator Principles call for financial institutions to provide loans to projects under the following circumstances: - The risk of the project is categorized in accordance with internal guidelines based upon the environmental and social screening criteria of the IFC. - For Category A and B projects, borrowers or sponsors are required to conduct a Social and Environmental Assessment, the preparation of which must meet certain requirements and satisfactorily address key social and environmental issues. - The Social and Environmental Assessment report should address baseline social and environmental conditions, requirements under host country laws and regulations, sustainable development, and, as appropriate, IFC's Environmental, Health and Safety Guidelines, etc. - Based on the Social and Environmental Assessment, Equator banks then make agreements with borrowers on how they mitigate, monitor and manage the risks through a Social and Environmental Management System. Compliance with the plan is included in the covenant clause of loan agreements. If the borrower doesn't comply with the agreed terms, the bank will take corrective actions. The Equator Principles are not a mere declaration of cautious banks but a full commitment of lenders. A violation of the Principles in the process of project financing, which led to an unexpected damage to the affected community, would not give rise to any specific legal remedies other than ordinary lawsuits. So it is more effective for banks to ensure consistent implementation of the Principles and to have them take responsible measures to solve social and environmental issues. Public interests have recently mounted up with respect to environmental issues on the occasion of the Supreme Court's decision (2006Du330) on the fiercely debated reclamation project at Saemangeum. The majority Justices said that the expected environmental damages like probable pollution of water and soil were not believed so serious and that the Administration should continue to implement the project seeking ways to make it more environment friendly. In this case, though the Category A Saemangeum Project was carried out by a government agency, the Supreme Court behaved itself as a signal giver to approve or stop the environment-related project like an Equator bank in project financing. At present, there is no Equator bank in Korea in contrast to three big banks in Japan. Also Korean contractors, which are aggressively bidding for Category A-type projects in South East Asia and Mideast, might find themselves in a disadvantageous position because they are generally ignorant of the environmental assessment associated with project financing. In this regard, Korean banks and overseas project contractors should care for the revised Equator Principles and the latest developments in project financing more seriously. It's because its scope has expanded to the capital cost of US$10 million or more across all industry sectors regardless of developing countries or not. It should be noted that, for a Korean bank, being an Equator bank is more or less burdensome in a short-term period, but it must be conducive to minimizing risks and building up good reputation in the long run.
For the last few decades, many studies have tried to explore and unveil venture companies' success factors and unique features in order to identify the sources of such companies' competitive advantages over their rivals. Such venture companies have shown tendency to give high returns for investors generally making the best use of information technology. For this reason, many venture companies are keen on attracting avid investors' attention. Investors generally make their investment decisions by carefully examining the evaluation criteria of the alternatives. To them, credit rating information provided by international rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch is crucial source as to such pivotal concerns as companies stability, growth, and risk status. But these types of information are generated only for the companies issuing corporate bonds, not venture companies. Therefore, this study proposes a method for evaluating venture businesses by presenting our recent empirical results using financial data of Korean venture companies listed on KOSDAQ in Korea exchange. In addition, this paper used multi-class SVM for the prediction of DEA-based efficiency rating for venture businesses, which was derived from our proposed method. Our approach sheds light on ways to locate efficient companies generating high level of profits. Above all, in determining effective ways to evaluate a venture firm's efficiency, it is important to understand the major contributing factors of such efficiency. Therefore, this paper is constructed on the basis of following two ideas to classify which companies are more efficient venture companies: i) making DEA based multi-class rating for sample companies and ii) developing multi-class SVM-based efficiency prediction model for classifying all companies. First, the Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) is a non-parametric multiple input-output efficiency technique that measures the relative efficiency of decision making units(DMUs) using a linear programming based model. It is non-parametric because it requires no assumption on the shape or parameters of the underlying production function. DEA has been already widely applied for evaluating the relative efficiency of DMUs. Recently, a number of DEA based studies have evaluated the efficiency of various types of companies, such as internet companies and venture companies. It has been also applied to corporate credit ratings. In this study we utilized DEA for sorting venture companies by efficiency based ratings. The Support Vector Machine(SVM), on the other hand, is a popular technique for solving data classification problems. In this paper, we employed SVM to classify the efficiency ratings in IT venture companies according to the results of DEA. The SVM method was first developed by Vapnik (1995). As one of many machine learning techniques, SVM is based on a statistical theory. Thus far, the method has shown good performances especially in generalizing capacity in classification tasks, resulting in numerous applications in many areas of business, SVM is basically the algorithm that finds the maximum margin hyperplane, which is the maximum separation between classes. According to this method, support vectors are the closest to the maximum margin hyperplane. If it is impossible to classify, we can use the kernel function. In the case of nonlinear class boundaries, we can transform the inputs into a high-dimensional feature space, This is the original input space and is mapped into a high-dimensional dot-product space. Many studies applied SVM to the prediction of bankruptcy, the forecast a financial time series, and the problem of estimating credit rating, In this study we employed SVM for developing data mining-based efficiency prediction model. We used the Gaussian radial function as a kernel function of SVM. In multi-class SVM, we adopted one-against-one approach between binary classification method and two all-together methods, proposed by Weston and Watkins(1999) and Crammer and Singer(2000), respectively. In this research, we used corporate information of 154 companies listed on KOSDAQ market in Korea exchange. We obtained companies' financial information of 2005 from the KIS(Korea Information Service, Inc.). Using this data, we made multi-class rating with DEA efficiency and built multi-class prediction model based data mining. Among three manners of multi-classification, the hit ratio of the Weston and Watkins method is the best in the test data set. In multi classification problems as efficiency ratings of venture business, it is very useful for investors to know the class with errors, one class difference, when it is difficult to find out the accurate class in the actual market. So we presented accuracy results within 1-class errors, and the Weston and Watkins method showed 85.7% accuracy in our test samples. We conclude that the DEA based multi-class approach in venture business generates more information than the binary classification problem, notwithstanding its efficiency level. We believe this model can help investors in decision making as it provides a reliably tool to evaluate venture companies in the financial domain. For the future research, we perceive the need to enhance such areas as the variable selection process, the parameter selection of kernel function, the generalization, and the sample size of multi-class.
Operations research has developed rapidly since its origins in World War II. Practitioners of O. R. have contributed to almost every aspect of government and business. More recently, a number of operations researchers have turned their attention to library and information systems, and the author believes that significant research has resulted. It is the purpose of this essay to introduce the library audience to some of these accomplishments, to present some of the author's hypotheses on the subject of library management to which he belives O. R. has great potential, and to suggest some future research directions. Some problem areas in librianship where O. R. may play a part have been discussed and are summarized below. (1) Library location. It is usually necessary to make balance between accessibility and cost In location problems. Many mathematical methods are available for identifying the optimal locations once the balance between these two criteria has been decided. The major difficulties lie in relating cost to size and in taking future change into account when discriminating possible solutions. (2) Planning new facilities. Standard approaches to using mathematical models for simple investment decisions are well established. If the problem is one of choosing the most economical way of achieving a certain objective, one may compare th althenatives by using one of the discounted cash flow techniques. In other situations it may be necessary to use of cost-benefit approach. (3) Allocating library resources. In order to allocate the resources to best advantage the librarian needs to know how the effectiveness of the services he offers depends on the way he puts his resources. The O. R. approach to the problems is to construct a model representing effectiveness as a mathematical function of levels of different inputs(e.g., numbers of people in different jobs, acquisitions of different types, physical resources). (4) Long term planning. Resource allocation problems are generally concerned with up to one and a half years ahead. The longer term certainly offers both greater freedom of action and greater uncertainty. Thus it is difficult to generalize about long term planning problems. In other fields, however, O. R. has made a significant contribution to long range planning and it is likely to have one to make in librarianship as well. (5) Public relations. It is generally accepted that actual and potential users are too ignorant both of the range of library services provided and of how to make use of them. How should services be brought to the attention of potential users? The answer seems to lie in obtaining empirical evidence by controlled experiments in which a group of libraries participated. (6) Acquisition policy. In comparing alternative policies for acquisition of materials one needs to know the implications of each service which depends on the stock. Second is the relative importance to be ascribed to each service for each class of user. By reducing the level of the first, formal models will allow the librarian to concentrate his attention upon the value judgements which will be necessary for the second. (7) Loan policy. The approach to choosing between loan policies is much the same as the previous approach. (8) Manpower planning. For large library systems one should consider constructing models which will permit the skills necessary in the future with predictions of the skills that will be available, so as to allow informed decisions. (9) Management information system for libraries. A great deal of data can be available in libraries as a by-product of all recording activities. It is particularly tempting when procedures are computerized to make summary statistics available as a management information system. The values of information to particular decisions that may have to be taken future is best assessed in terms of a model of the relevant problem. (10) Management gaming. One of the most common uses of a management game is as a means of developing staff's to take decisions. The value of such exercises depends upon the validity of the computerized model. If the model were sufficiently simple to take the form of a mathematical equation, decision-makers would probably able to learn adequately from a graph. More complex situations require simulation models. (11) Diagnostics tools. Libraries are sufficiently complex systems that it would be useful to have available simple means of telling whether performance could be regarded as satisfactory which, if it could not, would also provide pointers to what was wrong. (12) Data banks. It would appear to be worth considering establishing a bank for certain types of data. It certain items on questionnaires were to take a standard form, a greater pool of data would de available for various analysis. (13) Effectiveness measures. The meaning of a library performance measure is not readily interpreted. Each measure must itself be assessed in relation to the corresponding measures for earlier periods of time and a standard measure that may be a corresponding measure in another library, the 'norm', the 'best practice', or user expectations.
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