• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.247-269
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• 2007

In recent years, one of the major reasons for the fierce competition amongst firms is that they strive to increase their own market shares and customer acquisition rate in the same market with similar and apparently undifferentiated products in terms of quality and perceived benefit. Because of this change in recent marketing environment, the differentiated after-sales service and diversified promotion strategies have become more important to gain competitive advantage. Price promotion is the favorite strategy that most retailers use to achieve short-term sales increase, induce consumer's brand switch, in troduce new product into market, and so forth. However, if marketers apply or copy an identical price promotion strategy without considering the characteristic differences in product and consumer preference, it will cause serious problems because discounted price itself could make people skeptical about product quality, and the changes of perceived value might appear differently depending on other factors such as consumer involvement or brand attitude. Previous studies showed that price promotion would certainly increase sales, and the discounted price compared to regular price would enhance the consumer's perceived values. On the other hand, discounted price itself could make people depreciate or skeptical about product quality, and reduce the consumers' positivity bias because consumers might be unsure whether the current price promotion is the retailer's best price offer. Moreover, we cannot say that discounted price absolutely enhances the consumer's perceived values regardless of product category and purchase situations. That is, the factors that affect consumers' value perceptions and buying behavior are so diverse in reality that the results of studies on the same dependent variable come out differently depending on what variable was used or how experiment conditions were designed. Majority of previous researches on the effect of price-comparison advertising have used consumers' buying behavior as dependent variable. In order to figure out consumers' buying behavior theoretically, analysis of value perceptions which influence buying intentions is needed. In addition, they did not combined the independent variables such as brand loyalty and price discount rate together. For this reason, this paper tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception. And we provided with theoretical and managerial implications that marketers need to consider such variables as product attributes, brand loyalty, and consumer involvement at the same time, and then establish a differentiated pricing strategy case by case in order to enhance consumer's perceived values properl. Three research concepts were used in our study and each concept based on past researches was defined. The perceived acquisition value in this study was defined as the perceived net gains associated with the products or services acquired. That is, the perceived acquisition value of the product will be positively influenced by the benefits buyers believe they are getting by acquiring and using the product, and negatively influenced by the money given up to acquire the product. And the perceived transaction value was defined as the perception of psychological satisfaction or pleasure obtained from taking advantage of the financial terms of the price deal. Lastly, the brand loyalty was defined as favorable attitude towards a purchased product. Thus, a consumer loyal to a brand has an emotional attachment to the brand or firm. Repeat purchasers continue to buy the same brand even though they do not have an emotional attachment to it. We assumed that if the degree of brand loyalty is high, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value will increase when higher discount rate is provided. But we found that there are no significant differences in values between two different discount rates as a result of empirical analysis. It means that price reduction did not affect consumer's brand choice significantly because the perceived sacrifice decreased only a little, and customers are satisfied with product's benefits when brand loyalty is high. From the result, we confirmed that consumers with high degree of brand loyalty to a specific product are less sensitive to price change. Thus, using price promotion strategy to merely expect sale increase is not recommendable. Instead of discounting price, marketers need to strengthen consumers' brand loyalty and maintain the skimming strategy. On the contrary, when the degree of brand loyalty is low, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value decreased significantly when higher discount rate is provided. Generally brands that are considered inferior might be able to draw attention away from the quality of the product by making consumers focus more on the sacrifice component of price. But considering the fact that consumers with low degree of brand loyalty are known to be unsatisfied with product's benefits and have relatively negative brand attitude, bigger price reduction offered in experiment condition of this paper made consumers depreciate product's quality and benefit more and more, and consumer's psychological perceived sacrifice increased while perceived values decreased accordingly. We infer that, in the case of inferior brand, a drastic price-cut or frequent price promotion may increase consumers' uncertainty about overall components of product. Therefore, it appears that reinforcing the augmented product such as after-sale service, delivery and giving credit which is one of the levels consisting of product would be more effective in reality. This will be better rather than competing with product that holds high brand loyalty by reducing sale price. Although this study tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception, there are several limitations. This study was conducted in controlled conditions where the high involvement product and two different levels of discount rate were applied. Given the presence of low involvement product, when both pieces of information are available, it is likely that the results we have reported here may have been different. Thus, this research results explain only the specific situation. Second, the sample selected in this study was university students in their twenties, so we cannot say that the results are firmly effective to all generations. Future research that manipulates the level of discount along with the consumer involvement might lead to a more robust understanding of the effects various discount rate. And, we used a cellular phone as a product stimulus, so it would be very interesting to analyze the result when the product stimulus is an intangible product such as service. It could be also valuable to analyze whether the change of perceived value affects consumers' final buying behavior positively or negatively.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.23-38
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• 2012

There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems. Our experiments use a real dataset acquired from one of the largest internet shopping malls in Korea. We use 66,278 transactions of 3,847 customers conducted during the last two years. Overall results show that the accuracy of association rules of frequent shoppers (whose average duration between orders is relatively short) is higher than that of causal shoppers. In addition we discover that with frequent shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears very high when the co-occurrence criteria of the training set corresponds to the validation set (i.e., target set). It implies that the co-occurrence criteria of frequent shoppers should be set according to the application purpose period. For example, an analyzer should use a day as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to offer a coupon valid only for a day to potential customers who will use the coupon. On the contrary, an analyzer should use a month as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to publish a coupon book that can be used for a month. In the case of causal shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears to not be affected by the period of the application purposes. The accuracy of the causal shoppers' association rules becomes higher when the longer co-occurrence criterion has been adopted. It implies that an analyzer has to set the co-occurrence criterion for as long as possible, regardless of the application purpose period.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.245-261
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• 2020

The aim of this study is to investigate the correlation between the support activities provided by the franchiser and how they affect the intention of the contract renewal and business performances made by franchisees, developing dynamic trust between these transactional partners. Various supportive activities between franchiser and franchisees were divided into financial and non-financial activities and dynamic trust into Transitional-based trust, Calculative-based trust, Relational-based trust, and Balanced-based trust. These trust types, which are variable and adjustable based on the opportunistic behaviors of business parties, were applied to define the impact of the support activities on the contract renewal intention and the performances. This study was developed around domestic franchisees. An investigator visited business owners and manager level-employees, explained the purpose of the survey prior to the response, and the answers were directly written by hands. A total of 348 copies were used for the analysis. As the results of the analysis, first, financial support activities were found to have a positive(+) effect on transitional-based trust, calculative-based trust, and balanced-based trust. On the other hand, non-financial support activities were found to have a positive(+) effect on calculative-based trust, relational-based trust, and balanced-based trust, and there was no significant relationship on transitional-based trust. Second, the dynamic trust had a statistically significant positive(+) effect on inducing the contract renewal. Lastly, in the relationship between the dynamic trust and its impact on business performances, only transitional-based trust, and relational-based trust were found to have a positive(+) effect on the financial performances. In addition, relational-based trust showed a meaningful positive(+) relationship on the non-financial performances, and non-financial performace showed a meaningful positive(+) relationship on the re-contract intention. From the results, it can be concluded that the financial and non-financial activities for a win-win partnership between franchiser and franchisees are essential in not only forming dynamic trust but also boosting business performances as well as maintaining the business relationship. Thus, it suggests that building a win-win partnership can be promoted more efficiently by specifying activities best suitable for a particular relationship. In addition, a specific set of activities could be presented for establishing the level of trust that is formed in situations that vary depending on transaction risks and interdependency arising from having the transactional relationship based on the contract as the franchise industry features. Eventually, it is expected that this study can provide a way to promote the qualitative improvement of the franchise industry by identifying factors essential to establishing a sustainable win-win system and relationships that can improve the business performance of franchisees.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.239-276
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• 2009

The paper investigates the possible relationship between earnings prediction by security analysts and special ownership ties that link security companies those analysts belong to and firms under analysis. "Security analysts" are known best for their role as information producers in stock markets where imperfect information is prevalent and transaction costs are high. In such a market, changes in the fundamental value of a company are not spontaneously reflected in the stock price, and the security analysts actively produce and distribute the relevant information crucial for the price mechanism to operate efficiently. Therefore, securing the fairness and accuracy of information they provide is very important for efficiencyof resource allocation as well as protection of investors who are excluded from the special relationship. Evidence of systematic distortion of information by the special tie naturally calls for regulatory intervention, if found. However, one cannot presuppose the existence of distorted information based on the common ownership between the appraiser and the appraisee. Reputation effect is especially cherished by security firms and among analysts as indispensable intangible asset in the industry, and the incentive to maintain good reputation by providing accurate earnings prediction may overweigh the incentive to offer favorable rating or stock recommendation for the firms that are affiliated by common ownership. This study shares the theme of existing literature concerning the effect of conflict of interests on the accuracy of analyst's predictions. This study, however, focuses on the potential conflict of interest situation that may originate from the Korea-specific ownership structure of large conglomerates. Utilizing an extensive database of analysts' reports provided by WiseFn(R) in Korea, we perform empirical analysis of potential relationship between earnings prediction and common ownership. We first analyzed the prediction bias index which tells how optimistic or friendly the analyst's prediction is compared to the realized earnings. It is shown that there exists no statistically significant relationship between the prediction bias and common ownership. This is a rather surprising result since it is observed that the frequency of positive prediction bias is higher with such ownership tie. Next, we analyzed the prediction accuracy index which shows how accurate the analyst's prediction is compared to the realized earnings regardless of its sign. It is also concluded that there is no significant association between the accuracy ofearnings prediction and special relationship. We interpret the results implying that market discipline based on reputation effect is working in Korean stock market in the sense that security companies do not seem to be influenced by an incentive to offer distorted information on affiliated firms. While many of the existing studies confirm the relationship between the ability of the analystand the accuracy of the analyst's prediction, these factors cannot be controlled in the above analysis due to the lack of relevant data. As an indirect way to examine the possibility that such relationship might have distorted the result, we perform an additional but identical analysis based on a sub-sample consisting only of reports by best analysts. The result also confirms the earlier conclusion that the common ownership structure does not affect the accuracy and bias of earnings prediction by the analyst.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.189-195
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• 2014

In this research, we investigate the relationship between volatility and the trading volumes of trader types in the KOSPI 200 index stock market, futures market, and options market. Three types of investors are considered: individual, institutional, and foreign investors. The empirical results show that the volatility of the stock market and futures market are affected by the transaction information from another market. This means that there exists the cross-market effect of trading volume to explain volatility. It turns out that the option market volatility is not explained by any trading volume of trader types. This is because the option market volatility, VKOSPI, is the volatility index that reflects traders' expectation on one month ahead underlying volatility. Third, individual investors tend to increase volatilities, whereas institutions and foreign investors tend to stabilize volatilities. These results can be used in the areas of investment strategies, risk management, and financial market stability.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.41-61
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• 2001

Many markets are forecast to see significant changes due to the growth of electronic commerce made possible by the internet. The way of doing business with internet affects the market mechanism. It is now over 10 years since Malone et al(1987) set out their hypothesis on electronic markets, and electronic hierarchies. An electronic market is an interorganizational information system through which multiple buyers and sellers interact to accomplish one or more of the following market-making activities. And they predicted that markets evolve toward electronic markets, by reducing search cost, which may result in significantly. higher price competition among sellers and therefore lower prices for buyers. And the degree of two factors; asset specificity and uncertainty, affect the market mechanism. Products with low asset specificity and low uncertainty are compatible with a market relationship while the greater the asset specificity and uncertainty, the more likely it is to favour a hierarchical structure. Based on the these researches, we observed and analyzed a case study of market mechanism in Internet business. We found the fact that even though Internet could make the business environment in which lots of buyers and suppliers participate, electronic market will evolve market mechanism. 1 analyzed two factors, which affected market evolution. First, When Asset specificity is low in electronic commerce, market structure should be preferred to hierarchical structure. Second, When transaction uncertainty is low in electronic commerce, market structure should be preferred In hierarchical structure. This research covers conceptual and empirical aspects on electronic market structure. Future research should be variously done about the influential factors of electronic market mechanism.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.277-314
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• 2006

This article aims at analysing the reality of banks' liability resulting from the breach of contract on its part to keep the business secrecy with the supplier in the transferable credit, focusing on a English decision, Jackson v. Royal Bank of Scotland [2005] UKHL 3. In this case, the applicant, 'Econ', had purchased various varieties of pre-packed dog chews in bulk through 'Sam'(lst beneficiary) from 'PPLtd'(2nd beneficiary) in Thailand, using a transferable letter of credit issued by 'RBank'. 'Sam' charged a tremendous amount of mark-up on each transaction and it had not been disclosed to 'Econ', although the identity of 'PPLtd' was revealed to 'Econ' by various documents. However, 'RBank' made an unfortunate error to send an completion statement and other documents including 'PPLtd.'s invoice to 'Econ' instead of to 'Sam'. The effect of the Bank's error was to reveal to 'Econ' the substantial profit that 'Sam' was making on these transactions. CEO of 'Econ' was furious and, as a result, decided to cut 'Sam' out of its importing system and terminated their relationship. 'Sam' sued 'RBank' for damages to recover the loss of profits which could have been possibly made, if the information on the mark-up would not have been exposed to 'Econ'. The House of Lord held that 'RBank' was in breach of its duty of confidence, so 'Sam' was entitled to recover damages on a decreasing scale over 4 years, since there was no specific undertaking from the letter of credit.

• The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.9-42
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• 1974

Korea is a peninsular country surrounded by seas on three sides, and the fishing industry has carried out the service of suppling to the people with important anima protein. The distribution of fishery products has very complicated structures, because the production is in charge of small producers scattering along the coast all over the country, while consumpstion is made by separate homes in areas away from producing district. The relation between these two factors the structures make very complicated. The most typical and special structures of fishery distridution are distinguished in two, that is, one is landing market, the other is inland market. Landing markets have been monopolized by fishermen's cooperatives, providing with landing facilities and building sites. Fish markets played not only an important role in the landing, but distribution and price determination of catches by auction or tender. Inland markets are two types of wholesale market in consuming center, one is the terminal market for urban consumers, the other type is the local market for rural consumers. Fundamental functions of landing markets are gathering, assessment, and distribution functions. Gathering function is in charge of wholesaler in fishery cooperative. Gathering amounts are equal to gathering capacity of wholesaler and transact ability of licensed dealers as shown below model. Gathering amount=f.gathering capacity(=pre price.landing facility.account of wholesaler.distance of fishing ground.conveniency purchasing.home port)=fㆍ transact ability of licensed dealers≒f.population or port, and table 1 indicates these relationship. Assessment and distribution functions are in charge of licensed dealers in consumption side. Assessment function should bring the value in production activity through the auction between the cooperative seller and the licensed dealer as buyer. For fair trade transaction in auction, the free competition is supposed to be a prerequisite among the licensed dealers. The ideal condition for free competition is sameness in the scale of buying amount by licensed delaers, but it is almost impossible to attain its goal in actual marketing.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.181-201
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• 2006

As the Internet spreads, many people have interests in e-CRM and product recommender systems, one of e-CRM applications. Among various approaches for recommendation, collaborative filtering and content-based approaches have been investigated and applied widely. Despite their popularity, traditional recommendation approaches have some limitations. They require at least one purchase transaction per user. In addition, they don't utilize much information such as demographic and specific personal profile information. This study suggests new hybrid recommendation model using two data mining techniques, association rule and classification, as well as intelligent agent to overcome these limitations. To validate the usefulness of the model, it was applied to the real case and the prototype web site was developed. We assessed the usefulness of the suggested recommendation model through online survey. The result of the survey showed that the information of the recommendation was generally useful to the survey participants.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.191-205
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• 2005

This paper presents a novel product recommender system as a tool fur differentiated marketing service of online shopping malls. Ihe proposed model uses genetic algorithnt one of popular global optimization techniques, to construct a personalized product recommender systen The genetic algorinun may be useful to recommendation engine in product recommender system because it produces optimal or near-optimal recommendation rules using the customer profile and transaction data. In this study, we develop a prototype of WeLbased personalized product recommender system using the recommendation rules fi:om the genetic algorithnL In addition, this study evaluates usefulness of the proposed model through the test fur user satisfaction in real world.