• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.111-125
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• 2023

Due to the car's central role in modern life, the industry has become more fiercely competitive, with each manufacturer doing everything it can to attract buyers with features like plush interiors, comprehensive warranties, and helpful customer service departments. Customers may not have the luxury of buying a new car, so they will have to buy a used car. Nevertheless, in most cases, the customer (car driver) may be deceived about the vehicle information and history and thus will be confused in making his/her decision to purchase. In addition, after all attempts to obtain vehicle information (plate number, model, year of manufacture, number of maintenance times, accidents, etc.), the customer's many attempts may fail. In general, the government records and verifies the information of all cars, even those that pass through their borders. However, there might still be some trouble in obtaining this information. From this standpoint, we will design a website that makes it easier for car drivers, car companies and governments to carry out all the above-mentioned processes. It will also allow users, whether a driver or a car company, to inquire about all vehicle information through detailed and integrated reports on its condition since its entry into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until the present time, in addition to information supported by numbers and statistics to ensure the integrity and reliability of the information. This platform will save the trouble of searching for car information for drivers and car companies. It will also help governments keep track of the information of all cars entering and leaving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which will contribute to facilitating the process of viewing the history of any car that has previously entered the Kingdom's borders.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.131-159
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• 2014

Corporate rebranding has been evident in the qualitative corporate rebranding studies as an imposed organizational change that induces mixed reactions and ambivalent attitudes among consumers. Corporate rebranding for the established and familiar corporate brands leads to more ambivalent attitudes as these companies represent larger targets for disparaging information. Consumers are found to hold both positive and negative reactions toward companies and brands that they are familiar with. Nevertheless, the imposed change assumption and ambivalent attitude, in particular corporate rebranding, have never been widely explored in the quantitative corporate rebranding studies. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive empirical examination of the ambivalence towards rebrandingrebranded brand attitude-purchase intention relationships. The author proposes that corporate rebranding for familiar corporate brands is a double-edged sword that not only raises the expectation for better performance, but also induces conflicted and ambivalent attitudes among consumers. These consumers' ambivalent attitudes are influenced by both the parent brands-related and general attitude factors which further affect their rebranded brand attitude and purchase intention. A total of 156 useable questionnaires were collected from Malaysian working adults; and two established Malaysian airfreight operators were utilized as the focal parent brands. The study found a significant impact of prior parent brand attitudes on ambivalence towards rebranding (ATR). The parent brand attitudes served as anchors in influencing how new information was processed (Mazaheri et al., 2011; Sherif & Hovland, 1961) and closely related to behavioral intention (Prislin & Quellete, 1996). The ambivalent attitudes experienced were higher when individuals held both positive and negative reactions toward the parent brands. Consumers also held higher ambivalent attitudes when they preferred one of the parent brands; while disliked the other brand. The study also found significant relationships between the lead brand and the rebranded brand attitude; and between the partner brands and ATR. The familiar but controversial partner brand contributed significantly to the ambivalent attitudes experienced; while the more established lead brand had significant impact on the rebranded brand attitude. The lead and partner brands, though both familiar, represented different meanings to consumers. The author attributed these results to the prior parent brand attitudes, the skepticism and their general ambivalence toward the corporate rebranding. Both general attitude factors (i.e. skepticism and general ambivalence towards rebranding) were found to have significant positive impacts on ATR. Skeptical individuals questioned the possibility of a successful rebranding (Chang, 2011) and were more careful with their evaluations toward 'too god to be true' or 'made in heaven' pair of companies. The embedded general ambivalent attitudes that people held toward rebranding could be triggered from the associative network by the ambiguous situation (Prislin & Quellete, 1996). In addition, the ambivalent rebranded brand attitude was found to lower down purchase intention, supporting Hanze (2001), Lavine (2001) and van Harreveld et al. (2009)'s studies. Ambivalent individuals were found to prefer delay decision making by choosing around the mid-ranged points in 'willingness to buy' scale. The study provides several marketing implications. Ambivalence management is proven to be important to corporate rebranding to minimize the ambivalent attitudes experienced. This could be done by carefully controlling the parent brands-related and general attitude factors. The high ambivalent individuals are less confident with their own conflicted attitudes and are motivated to get rid of the psychological discomfort caused by these conflicted attitudes (Bell & Esses, 2002; Lau-Gesk, 2005; van Harreveld et al., 2009). They tend to process information more deeply (Jonas et al., 1997; Maio et al., 2000; Wood et al., 1985) and pay more attention to message that provides convincible arguments. Providing strong, favorable and convincible message is hence effective in alleviating consumers' ambivalent attitudes. In addition, brand name heuristic could be utilized because the rebranding strategy sends important signal to consumers about the changes that happen or going to happen. The ambivalent individuals will pay attention to both brand name heuristic and rebranding message in their effort to alleviate the psychological discomfort caused by ambivalent attitudes. The findings also provide insights to Malaysian and airline operators for a better planning and implementation of corporate rebranding exercise.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.89-116
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• 2008

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is regarded as a core technology of ubiquitous computing. Although it has some technical limitations such as technological standardization of RFID tags as well as economical limitations, many companies around the world have already accepted RFID to improve their management efficiency. In this regard, this study is to meet with results that the adoption of RFID technology willbring opportunities that companies' operational process are improved and customer satisfaction is highly strengthened. This research focuses on providing more understanding for building RFID marketing strategy to suppliers who want to sell their RFID products to customers through analyzing purchasing process. The findings are as follows; First, the study shows that buying center members usually take product reliability and precision of technical specification in the case of new-task buying situation while they put their first purchasing priority on prices in the straight rebuy. Second, the finding presents that in new-task buying situation and the straight rebuy purchasing personnel get information about new products through product performance test, organizational engineers, opinions from other companies' purchasing personnel, and checking out samples. Third, this research demonstrates when it comes to purchasing risk in their first purchasing, the persons who are in charge of material purchasing are inclined to be aware of the risk most in technical problems, followed by financial problems and time delay problems in order. And in addition to those risks are mentioned above, once-again-purchasers take the risk like an opportunity loss for better products into consideration. Fourth, the study shows that the role of concerning departments makes no difference in each purchasing stage. Accordingly marketers need to beef up the differentiated strategy to persuade their customers Fifth, the findings of this study demonstrate that purchasing decision making is much influenced by the final users. So suppliers are supposed to perform the most active marketing strategy at the first stage of purchasing through various resources. Finally, the study presents that the suppliers who will have had close relationships with their customers need to give consistent information to them so that their customers can have lower motive in purchasing products from competitors.

• 한국벤처창업학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.11a
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• pp.257-282
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• 2008

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is regarded as a core technology of ubiquitous computing. Although it has some technical limitations such as technological standardization of RFID tags as well as economical limitations, many companies around the world have already accepted RFID to improve their management efficiency. In this regard, this study is to meet with results that the adoption of RFID technology willbring opportunities that companies' operational process are improved and customer satisfaction is highly strengthened. This research focuses on providing more understanding for building RFID marketing strategy to suppliers who want to sell their RFID products to customers through analyzing purchasing process. The findings are as follows; First, the study shows that buying center members usually take product reliability and precision of technical specification in the case of new-task buying situation while they put their first purchasing priority on prices in the straight rebuy. Second, the finding presents that in new-task buying situation and the straight rebuy purchasing personnel get information about new products through product performance test, organizational engineers, opinions from other companies' purchasing personnel, and checking out samples. Third, this research demonstrates when it comes to purchasing risk in their first purchasing, the persons who are in charge of material purchasing are inclined to be aware of the risk most in technical problems, followed by financial problems and time delay problems in order. And in addition to those risks are mentioned above, once-again-purchasers take the risk like an opportunity loss for better products into consideration. Fourth, the study shows that the role of concerning departments makes no difference in each purchasing stage. Accordingly marketers need to beef up the differentiated strategy to persuade their customers. Fifth, the findings of this study demonstrate that purchasing decision making is much influenced by the final users. So suppliers are supposed to perform the most active marketing strategy at the first stage of purchasing through various resources. Finally, the study presents that the suppliers who will have had close relationships with their customers need to give consistent information to them so that their customers can have lower motive in purchasing products from competitors.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.67-95
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the transference of trust process, an important factor to consumer's purchase decision-making. Even though several researchers have discussed the trust transference process, there is no research related to this concept. Specifically we have focused on the transference of trust from the retailer to low involvement private label (PL) products. PL products were chosen as transference of trust occurs under ambiguity due to lack of information about the product and their manufacturer. PL products provide relatively less information than national brand (NB) products. In addition, retailers have been rapidly expanding their PL product categories. To identify the theoretical and empirical limitations of prior studies, we discuss several theories explaining the transference of trust: 'Balance theory' and 'availability heuristic' in transference of cognitive trust; 'affective transference' and 'affect as information' in transference of affective trust. An empirical test was performed. A self completion questionnaire was developed and administered to a convenience sample of PL users. 206 usable questionnaire were received. The results show that the transference of trust plays a mediating role linking the retailer to the manufacturer and to the product. Although our model, which included the transference process of trust as a mediating effect, did not improve the competitive model, the coefficients of the respective paths were found to be better. This study confirms the transference of cognitive trust from the retailer to both the manufacturer and the product, but not for affective trust. We offer the explanation that PL products may tend to have affective trust resulting from brand familiarity but not to their PL manufacturers.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.17-26
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• 2009

As the lifestyle of consumers changes and the need for various products increases, new products are being developed in the market. Each household owns various home appliances which are purchased through the choice of a decision maker. These appliances include not only large-sized products such as TV, refrigerator, and washing machine, but also small-sized products such as microwave oven and air cleaner. There exists latent correlation among possession of home appliances, even though they are purchased independently. The purpose of this research is to analyze the effect of demographic factors on the purchase and possession of each home appliances, and to derive some relationships among various appliances. To achieve this purpose, the present status on the possession of each home appliances are investigated through consumer survey data on the electric and energy product. And a multivariate probit(MVP) model is applied for the empirical analysis. From the estimation results, some appliances show a substitutive or complementary pattern as expected, while others which look apparently unrelated have correlation by co-incidence. This research has several advantages compared to previous literatures on home appliances. First, this research focuses on the various products which are purchased by each household, while previous researches such as Matsukawa and Ito(1998) and Yoon(2007) focus just on a particular product. Second, the methodology of this research can consider a choice process of each product and correlation among products simultaneously. Lastly, this research can analyze not only a substitutive or complementary relationship in the same category, but also the correlation among products in the different categories. As the data on the possession of home appliances in each household has a characteristic of multiple choice, not a single choice, a MVP model are used for the empirical analysis. A MVP model is derived from a random utility model, and has an advantage compared to a multinomial logit model in that correlation among error terms can be derive(Manchanda et al., 1999; Edwards and Allenby, 2003). It is assumed that the error term has a normal distribution with zero mean and variance-covariance matrix ${\Omega}$. Hence, the sign and value of correlation coefficients means the relationship between two alternatives(Manchanda et al., 1999). This research uses the data of 'TEMEP Household ICT/Energy Survey (THIES) 2008' which is conducted by Technology Management, Economics and Policy Program in Seoul National University. The empirical analysis of this research is accomplished in two steps. First, a MVP model with demographic variables is estimated to analyze the effect of the characteristics of household on the purchase of each home appliances. In this research, some variables such as education level, region, size of family, average income, type of house are considered. Second, a MVP model excluding demographic variables is estimated to analyze the correlation among each home appliances. According to the estimation results of variance-covariance matrix, each households tend to own some appliances such as washing machine-refrigerator-cleaner-microwave oven, and air conditioner-dish washer-washing machine and so on. On the other hand, several products such as analog braun tube TV-digital braun tube TV and desktop PC-portable PC show a substitutive pattern. Lastly, the correlation map of home appliances are derived using multi-dimensional scaling(MDS) method based on the result of variance-covariance matrix. This research can provide significant implications for the firm's marketing strategies such as bundling, pricing, display and so on. In addition, this research can provide significant information for the development of convergence products and related technologies. A convergence product can decrease its market uncertainty, if two products which consumers tend to purchase together are integrated into it. The results of this research are more meaningful because it is based on the possession status of each household through the survey data.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.19-45
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• 2008

This study is to empirically examine the primary dimensions of visual merchandising (VMD) of internet shopping mall, namely store design, merchandise, and merchandising cues, to be a attractive virtual store to the shoppers. The authors reviewed the literature related to the major components of VMD from the perspective of the AIDA model, which has been mainly applied to the offline store settings. The major purposes of the study are as follows; first, tries to derive the variables related with the components of visual merchandising through reviewing the existing literatures, establish the hypotheses, and test it empirically. Second, examines the relationships between the components of VMD and the attitude toward the VMD, however, putting more emphasis on finding out the component structure of the VMD. VMD needs to be examined with the perspective that an online shopping mall is a virtual self-service or clerkless store, which could reduce the number of employees, help the shoppers search, evaluate and purchase for themselves, and to be explored in terms of the in-store persuasion processes of customers. This study reviewed the literatures related to store design, merchandise, and merchandising cues which might be relevant to the store, product, and promotion respectively. VMD is a total communication tool, and AIDA model could explain the in-store consumer behavior of online shopping. Store design has to do with triggering a consumer attention to the online mall, merchandise with a product related interest, and merchandising cues with promotions such as recommendation and links that induce the desire to pruchase. These three steps might be seen as the processes for purchase actions. The theoretical rationale for the relationship between VMD and AIDA could be found in Tyagi(2005) that the three steps of consumer-oriented merchandising are a store, a product assortment, and placement, in Omar(1999) that three types of interior display are a architectural design display, commodity display, and point-of-sales(POS) display, and in Davies and Ward(2005) that the retail store interior image is related to an atmosphere, merchandise, and in-store promotion. Lee et al(2000) suggested as the web merchandising components a merchandising cues, a shopping metaphor which is an assistant tool for search, a store design, a layout(web design), and a product assortment. The store design which includes differentiation, simplicity and navigation is supposed to be related to the attention to the virtual store. Second, the merchandise dimensions comprising product assortments, visual information and product reputation have to do with the interest in the product offerings. Finally, the merchandising cues that refer to merchandiser(MD)'s recommendation of products and providing the hyperlinks to relevant goods for the shopper is concerned with attempt to induce the desire to purchase. The questionnaire survey was carried out to collect the data about the consumers who would shop at internet shopping malls frequently. To select the subject malls, the mall ranking data announced by a mall rating agency was used to differentiate the most popular and least popular five mall each. The subjects was instructed to answer the questions after navigating the designated mall for five minutes. The 300 questionnaire was distributed to the consumers, 166 samples were used in the final analysis. The empirical testing focused on identifying and confirming the dimensionality of VMD and its subdimensions using a structural equation modeling method. The confirmatory factor analysis for the endogeneous and exogeneous variables was carried out in four parts. The second-order factor analysis was done for a store design, a merchandise, and a merchandising cues, and first-order confirmatory factor analysis for the attitude toward the VMD. The model test results shows that the chi-square value of structural equation is 144.39(d.f 49), significant at 0.01 level which means the proposed model was rejected. But, judging from the ratio of chi-square value vs. degree of freedom, the ratio was 2.94 which smaller than an acceptable level of 3.0, RMR is 0.087 which is higher than a generally acceptable level of 0.08. GFI and AGFI is turned out to be 0.90 and 0.84 respectively. Both NFI and NNFI is 0.94, and CFI 0.95. The major test results are as follows; first, the second-order factor analysis and structural equational modeling reveals that the differentiation, simplicity and ease of identifying current status of the transaction are confirmed to be subdimensions of store design and to be a significant predictors of the dependent variable. This result implies that when designing an online shopping mall, it is necessary to differentiate visually from other malls to improve the effectiveness of the communications of store design. That is, the differentiated store design raise the contrast stimulus to sensory organs to promote the memory of the store and to have a favorable attitude toward the VMD of a store. The results that navigation which means the easiness of identifying current status of shopping affects the attitude to VMD could be interpreted that the navigating processes via the hyperlinks which is characteristics of an internet shopping is a complex and cognitive process and shoppers are likely to lack the sense of overall structure of the store. Consequently, shoppers are likely to be alost amid shopping not knowing where to go. The orientation tool enhance the accessibility of information to raise the perceptive power about the store environment.(Titus & Everett 1995) Second, the primary dimension of merchandise and its subdimensions was confirmed to be unidimensional respectively, have a construct validity, and nomological validity which the VMD dimensions supposed to have a positive correlation with the dependent variable. The subdimensions of product assortment, brand fame and information provision proved to have a positive effect on the attitude toward the VMD. It could be interpreted that the more plentiful the product and brand assortment of the mall is, the more likely the shoppers to favor it. Brand fame and information provision as well affect the VMD attitude, which means that the more famous the brand, the more likely the shoppers would trust and feel familiar with the mall, and the plentifully and visually presented information could have the shopper have a favorable attitude toward the store VMD. Third, it turned out to be that merchandising cue of product recommendation and hyperlinks affect the VMD attitude. This could be interpreted that recommended products could reduce the uncertainty related with the purchase decision, and the hyperlinks to relevant products would help the shopper save the cognitive effort exerted into the information search and gathering, which could lead to a favorable attitude to the VMD. This study tried to sheds some new light on the VMD of online store by reviewing the variables mentioned to be relevant with offline VMD in the existing literatures, and tried to link the VMD components from the perspective of AIDA model. The effect size of the VMD dimensions on the attitude was in the order of the merchandise, the store design and the merchandising cues.It is said that an internet has an unlimited place for display, however, the virtual store is not unlimited since the consumer has a limited amount of cognitive ability to process the external information and internal memory. Particularly, the shoppers are likely to face some difficulties in decision making on account of too many alternative and information overloads. Therefore, the internet shopping mall manager should take into consideration the cost of information search on the part of the consumer, to establish the optimal product placements and search routes. An efficient store composition would be possible by reducing the psychological burdens and cognitive efforts exerted to information search and alternatives evaluation. The store image is in most part determined by the product category and its brand it deals in. The results of this study support this proposition that the merchandise is most important to the VMD attitude than other components, the manager is required to take a strategic approach to VMD. The internet users are getting more accustomed and more knowledgeable about the internet media and more likely to accept the internet as a shopping channel as the period of time during which they use the internet to shop become longer. The web merchandiser should be aware that the product introduction using a moving pictures and a bulletin board become more important in order to present the interactive product information visually and communicate with customers more actively, therefore leading to making the quantity and quality of product information more rich.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.91-108
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• 2020

Korea's famous soccer players are steadily performing well in international leagues, which led to higher interests of Korean fans in the international leagues. Reflecting the growing social phenomenon of rising interests on international leagues by Korean fans, the study examined the overall consumer perception in the consumption of uniform by domestic soccer fans and compared the changes in perception following the transfers of the players. Among others, the paper examined the consumer perception and purchase factors of soccer fans shown in social media, focusing on periods before and after the recruitment of Heung-Min Son to English Premier League's Tottenham Football Club. To this end, the EPL uniform is the collection keyword the paper utilized and collected consumer postings from domestic website and social media via Python 3.7, and analyzed them using Ucinet 6, NodeXL 1.0.1, and SPSS 25.0 programs. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the uniform of the club that consistently topped the league, has been gaining attention as a popular uniform, and the players' performance, and the players' position have been identified as key factors in the purchase and search of professional football uniforms. In the case of the club, the actual ranking and whether the league won are shown to be important factors in the purchase and search of professional soccer uniforms. The club's emblem and the sponsor logo that will be attached to the uniform are also factors of interest to consumers. In addition, in the decision making process of purchase of a uniform by professional soccer fan, uniform's form, marking, authenticity, and sponsors are found to be more important than price, design, size, and logo. The official online store has emerged as a major purchasing channel, followed by gifts for friends or requests from acquaintances when someone travels to the United Kingdom. Second, a classification of key control categories through the convergence of iteration correlation analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm shows differences in the classification of individual groups, but groups that include the EPL's club and player keywords are identified as the key topics in relation to professional football uniforms. Third, between 2002 and 2006, the central theme for professional football uniforms was World Cup and English Premier League, but from 2012 to 2015, the focus has shifted to more interest of domestic and international players in the English Premier League. The subject has changed to the uniform itself from this time on. In this context, the paper can confirm that the major issues regarding the uniforms of professional soccer players have changed since Ji-Sung Park's transfer to Manchester United, and Sung-Yong Ki, Chung-Yong Lee, and Heung-Min Son's good performances in these leagues. The paper also identified that the uniforms of the clubs to which the players have transferred to are of interest. Fourth, both male and female consumers are showing increasing interest in Son's league, the English Premier League, which Tottenham FC belongs to. In particular, the increasing interest in Son has shown a tendency to increase interest in football uniforms for female consumers. This study presents a variety of researches on sports consumption and has value as a consumer study by identifying unique consumption patterns. It is meaningful in that the accuracy of the interpretation has been enhanced by using a cluster analysis via convergence of iteration correlation analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm to identify the main topics. Based on the results of this study, the clubs will be able to maximize its profits and maintain good relationships with fans by identifying key drivers of consumer awareness and purchasing for professional soccer fans and establishing an effective marketing strategy.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.65-93
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• 2011

As relationship between buyer and seller has been brought closer and long-term relationship has been more important in B2B markets, the importance of service and service convenience increases as well as product. In homogeneous markets, where service offerings are similar and therefore not key competitive differentiator, providing greater convenience may enable a competitive advantage. Service convenience, as conceptualized by Berry et al. (2002), is defined as the consumers' time and effort perceptions related to buying or using a service. For this reason, B2B customers are interested in how fast the service is provided and how much save non-monetary cost like time or effort by the service convenience along with service quality. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate the impact of service convenience on relationship factors such as relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and relationship performance. The purpose of this study is to find out whether service convenience can be a new antecedent of relationship quality and relationship performance. In addition, this study tries to examine how five-dimensional service convenience constructs (decision convenience, access convenience, transaction convenience, benefit convenience, post-benefit convenience) affect customers' relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and relationship performance. The service convenience comprises five fundamental components - decision convenience (the perceived time and effort costs associated with service purchase or use decisions), access convenience(the perceived time and effort costs associated with initiating service delivery), transaction convenience(the perceived time and effort costs associated with finalizing the transaction), benefit convenience(the perceived time and effort costs associated with experiencing the core benefits of the offering) and post-benefit convenience (the perceived time and effort costs associated with reestablishing subsequent contact with the firm). Earlier studies of perceived service convenience in the industrial market are none. The conventional studies that have dealt with service convenience have usually been made in the consumer market, or they have dealt with convenience aspects in the service process. This service convenience measure for consumer market can be useful tool to estimate service quality in B2B market. The conceptualization developed by Berry et al. (2002) reflects a multistage, experiential consumption process in which evaluations of convenience vary at each stage. For this reason, the service convenience measure is good for B2B service environment which has complex processes and various types. Especially when categorizing B2B service as sequential stage of service delivery like Kumar and Kumar (2004), the Berry's service convenience measure which reflect sequential flow of service deliveries suitable to establish B2B service convenience. For this study, data were gathered from respondents who often buy business service and analyzed by structural equation modeling. The sample size in the present study is 119. Composite reliability values and average variance extracted values were examined for each variable to have reliability. We determine whether the measurement model supports the convergent validity by CFA, and discriminant validity was assessed by examining the correlation matrix of the constructs. For each pair of constructs, the square root of the average variance extracted exceeded their correlations, thus supporting the discriminant validity of the constructs. Hypotheses were tested using the Smart PLS 2.0 and we calculated the PLS path values and followed with a bootstrap re-sampling method to test the hypotheses. Among the five dimensional service convenience constructs, four constructs (decision convenience, transaction convenience, benefit convenience, post-benefit convenience) affected customers' positive relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and relationship performance. This result means that service convenience is important cue to improve relationship between buyer and seller. One of the five service convenience dimensions, access convenience, does not affect relationship quality and performance, which implies that the dimension of service convenience is not important factor of cumulative satisfaction. The Cumulative satisfaction can be distinguished from transaction-specific customer satisfaction, which is an immediate post-purchase evaluative judgment or an affective reaction to the most recent transactional experience with the firm. Because access convenience minimizes the physical effort associated with initiating an exchange, the effect on relationship satisfaction similar to cumulative satisfaction may be relatively low in terms of importance than transaction-specific customer satisfaction. Also, B2B firms focus on service quality, price, benefit, follow-up service and so on than convenience of time or place in service because it is relatively difficult to change existing transaction partners in B2B market compared to consumer market. In addition, this study using partial least squares methods reveals that customers' satisfaction and commitment toward relationship has mediating role between the service convenience and relationship performance. The result shows that management and investment to improve service convenience make customers' positive relationship satisfaction, and then the positive relationship satisfaction can enhance the relationship commitment and relationship performance. And to conclude, service convenience management is an important part of successful relationship performance management, and the service convenience is an important antecedent of relationship between buyer and seller such as the relationship commitment and relationship performance. Therefore, it has more important to improve relationship performance that service providers enhance service convenience although competitive service development or service quality improvement is important. Given the pressure to provide increased convenience, it is not surprising that organizations have made significant investments in enhancing the convenience aspect of their product and service offering.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.9B no.1
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• pp.1-6
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• 2002

Many customers consult the Internet before making purchase goods and using contents. The systems in the Internet could store a lot of data and classify the data into information to get relationship between a company and customers. To do that, let's consider a knowledge-assisted hybrid system that utilizes individually a customer's preference to make an optimal solution in the his/her decision making. The knowledge made by using the preference is employed to select an domain set appropriate to him/her business, and the process of selecting definitely provides the customer some benefits: elimination of discomfort from unknown information and reduction of costs and search time for forming an suitable domain set. To effectively adopt individual customer's preference and actively adapt change of business situation, this study propose an architecture of the system which includes rule presentations and an inference engine, and integrates a knowledge-based component into a quadratic programming component. In the experimental results, it is found that a knowledge-assisted hybrid system implemented by this idea is more flexible than existing systems in extension of knowledge about an customer's preference and goes beyond the traditional models.