• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.17-33
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• 2009

The emergence of the Internet shopping agent enabled consumers to enjoy Internet shopping more easily and quickly. Especially, the role of Internet shopping agent is becoming more important following the information overload trend on the Internet in that the consumers can promptly obtain information about a certain product and its price among countless items on the Internet. As a result, consumers can now enjoy shopping more easily, compared to the offline shopping which requires a lot of efforts in comparing the products and purchasing them. Since the Internet shopping agents collect extensive information about the products' price, delivery period, detailed characteristics, etc., and present a comparison table containing the information to the consumers, the consumers can shop more quickly at lower price using such shopping agents. However, it has not been sufficiently studied about how the various functions of shopping agents actually support consumers' purchase decision making procedure in everyday life, and if they do, in which stages they play a supporting role in consumers' purchase decision making system. Therefore, this study conducts an empirical analysis on the role of the Internet shopping agents in the purchase decision making process of the consumers, considering the Internet shopping agent as a decision making supporting system. Moreover, it analyzes how the effects of the Internet shopping agent differs according to the consumers' knowledge level about the products.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.28 no.3
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• pp.58-64
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• 2005

Customer sensibility based recommendation agent system was developed to tailor to the customer the suggestion of goods and the description of store catalog in on-line shopping mall. The recommendation agent system composed of five modules and seven services including specialized algorithm. This study was to investigate the effectiveness of the customer sensibility based recommendation agent system in on-line shopping mall. This study asked 30 male and female students to perform the task in on-line shopping mall and facilitated them questionnaires. The questionnaires were administered to subjects to measure quality precision, ease of use, support of buying, purchasing power, future intention of the system. The study revealed that good part of the subjects positively evaluated the customer sensibility based recommendation system except for ease of use. The study on usability of the recommendation agent system has need to be performed in next. This paper shows that the satisfaction and the buying power of customers may be improved by presenting customer sensibility based recommendation in on-line shopping mall.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.84-91
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• 2005

Recently comparison-shopping agent systems are promising to support purchase of buyers in online-shopping environment. This paper proposes a comparison-shopping agent system considered easy access and buyer's preference. Easy access is achieved by minimizing questions to buyer. Buyer's preference is considered by using pairwise comparison of products attributes. Procedure of the proposed system is explained with a case of notebook. Finally a prototype has been implemented.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.1-22
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• 1999

In this paper, we review and classify shopping information services for electronic commerce in Korea. Shopping information services for electronic commerce can be divided into shopping mall information service and product information service. Shopping mall information service simply shows and suggests information on the shopping malls that it has in its data store. But product information service provides information about the items of the shopping malls the service has and therefore gives more powerful and convenient interfaces to users. Cutting-edge product information services can perform online comparison shopping facility, which searches and compares the items what the users want on the reasonable basis of economical criteria, such as price. Books, CDs, and Personal Data Assistant(PDA)s are the products of which the specification is clear enough to be described on the Web. And the comparison of the products by the information service is performed on the basis of "price" of the product item. The approach to design and implement product information service can be divided into two categories. The one is an application of data warehousing mechanism, which stores the product information on the regular basis of time and provide it when the users query over the Web-database gateway. The other approach is a shopping agent mechanism, which stores information on "how to shop" and the shopping agent collects the information of product items just after users query about the product and provide the information in real time or notify them by alerting service. Thirty nine shopping information services are compared and classified in this paper and they are extracted from "Naver" and "Yahoo! Korea". The final result shows that most services are just a simple shopping mall information service in growing stage, product information services with data warehousing are lack in product ontology in middle stage, and that product information services with shopping agent are in early stage.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.38-46
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• 2004

To be successful in increasingly competitive Internet marketplace, it is essential to capture customer loyalty. This paper deals with an intelligent agent approach to incorporate customer's sensibility into an one-to-one recommendation service in on-line shopping mall. In this paper the focus of interest is on-line recommendation service algorithm for development of Human Sensibility based web agent system. The recommendation agent system composed of seven services including specialized algorithm. The on-line recommendation service algorithm use human sensibility ergonomics and on-line preference matching technologies to tailor to the customer the suggestion of goods and the description of store catalog. Customizing the system's behavior requires the parallel execution of several tasks during the interaction (e.g., identifying the customer's emotional preference and dynamically generating the pages of the store catalog). Most of the present shopping malls go through the catalog of goods, but the future shopping malls will have the form of intelligent shopping malls by applying the on-line recommendation service algorithm.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.97-113
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• 2005

This paper designed and implemented(programmed) a comparative shopping agent that helps consumers to shop at on-line shopping malls over Internet. At offline stores, as consumers usually tell a sales clerk about a manufacturer, functions and price range of an item they want to purchase, the sales clerk will show the products or relevant catalogues. Then the consumer will compare functions, design and prices of the product and buy it with the lowest price. PriceMeter, a comparative shopping agent, introduced in this paper, is designed best geared to this consumers' buying behavior. Basically, as consumers enter a manufacturer's name, price, features and etc. at a search window, PriceMeter will search the web and provide a list of product informations such as features and prices that meet the search conditions. Consumers can see the information in either a form of catalogue or a printing format. As consumers click specific items to examine closely, it will show prices and information about shopping malls that sell the requested items. Clicking a 'Buy' icon, the consumers will be transferred to the right web page at the linked shopping mall. The emergence of the comparative shopping agent will expedite a consumer-centered retailing economy in the age of e-commerce. As consumers are provided with a better set of product and shopping mall information, they can make better purchasing decisions and gain more bargaining power shifted from manufacturers(sellers). The presentation of this comparative shopping agent is intended to promote the consumer-centered B2C e-commerce.

• Journal of the Korea Computer Industry Society
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• v.4 no.12
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• pp.919-936
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• 2003

Nowadays Electronic Commerce shopping mall is welcomed more and more on the Internet. It is expected that Shopping mall systems come to be various and adaptable to complex requirements according to customers who have these various needs, but just show products list, instead. This thesis suggests various structures of shopping malls showing interface agent model using Case-Based Reasoning one of reasoning method of Artificial Intelligence instead of the method of prior EC shopping mall. 1 constructed case base by making index with shopping mall members and customers' private informations, and pursued difference from prior EC shopping malls by proposing to customers cases of other users' selection of products who have similar private informations with them.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.55-70
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• 2003

With the gradual growth of the electronic commerce various forms of shopping malls are constructed, and their searching methods and function are studied many ways. However, the recent outcome is still inadequate to search for goods for the tastes and demands of customers. To construct the shopping mall on the electronic commerce and help customers with purchasing goods, the efficient interface for the customers to contact the shopping malls should be founded and the customers should be able to search the goods they want. Therefore, in this paper, we designed the Intelligent Integration Agent System (IIAS) using the multi-agent formed by the integration agent which integrates the case based reasoning(CBR) and the rule based reasoning(RBR) and the user agent which manages users' profiles. IIAS performs the rule based reasoning on the subject issue first, then provides the unsatisfying search results from the rule-base reasoning to the customers through the user agent, which enables the search of the goods most similar to the ones that meet the tastes and demands of the customers. That is, the accuracy and the speed has been improved by reasoning with the similarity adjustable integration agent which can pick out the goods of customers wants by modifying the weights of properties according to those of the customers.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.53-66
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• 2004

In Korea, The Consumer Protection Law in Electronic Commerce, which came into effect in July 2002, forced internet shopping malls to provide a minimum of 7 forms of business information, including the name of the business, the name of the representative, geographical address, telephone number, fax number, e-mail address, and business license number, so that consumers could easily identify them. To investigate the shopping malls which do not provide their business information, can lead to confidence in the electronic commerce environment. To investigate the completeness of the business information with the internet shopping malls, this paper proposes the methods of gathering URLs of internet shopping malls, of extracting business information attributes, and an architecture of the agent system. Information extraction in our research is based on synonyms and indicator words of the attributes. With the experiment we showed that the accuracy of our agent system to find out the right business information is 89.3%.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.35 no.1
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• pp.1-9
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• 2012

It is well known that internet shoppers are very sensitive to sale prices. They visit the various shopping malls and collect the product information including purchase conditions for goods purchase decision-making. Recently the necessity of information support is increasing because of increase of information amount which is necessary and complexity of goods purchase decision-making process. The comparison shopping agent systems have provided price comparison information which is collected from various shopping malls to satisfy internet shoppers information craving. But the frequent price change caused by keen price competition is becoming the primary reason of information quality decline among price comparison sites. RSS which is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated is applied even in on-line shopping malls. This paper develops a RSS product information collection system to get real-time product information. The proposed product information system consists of (1) web crawler module for searching RSS feed shopping malls automatically, (2) RSS reader module for parsing product information from RSS feed file, (3) product DB and (4) product searching module. Performance of the proposed system is higher than the comparison shopping agent systems when it is defined with the volume of collecting product information per unit time.