• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.167-181
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• 2012

This study analyzed consumer's harsh complaining behaviors and firm's reactions toward consumers' harsh complaining behavior, and investigated the differences in the firms' reactions according to the characteristics of counselors and customer service centers. In addition, this study attempted to find a strategy and provide guidance regarding consumer's harsh complaining behaviors. The results of this study are discussed below. First, consumer's harsh complaining attitudes were expressed by crude language, violent language, threats, personal attacks, and claims of a high-ranking social position. Consumer's directive, complaining behaviors were repeated on the telephone, and threats of prosecution or disclosure to the public, exposure of habitual product returns, and requests for interviews with superiorsat the representative firm were made. Second, a firm typologies according to its reaction style toward a consumer's harsh complaining behaviors were as follows: Group 1, having a neutral attitude toward consumers and preparation thoroughly regarding their demands; Group 2, having a negative attitude toward consumers and some degree of preparation toward consumers' demands; and finally, Group 3, having a positive attitude toward consumers but offering insufficient reparation regarding consumers' demands. Third, female counselors, counselors having a certified counselor's license, and those much experience working in labor work were more likely to be in Group 3. Male counselors, part-time counselors, and those having experience of many years were more likely to be in Group 2. Group 1 were more likely to have large number of workers at customer service centers, male counselors, and to have large numbers of educational training programs related to the reactions of consumers in the form of dissatisfaction, complaints, how to offer compensation for injuries to consumers, and issues related to PL(product liability). In addition, Group 1 also had more firm level welfare policies related to hight stress levels of consumer counselors and extra types of support regarding harsh consumers. However, Group 2 members were more likely to provide excessive compensation and rewards to harsh consumers. Finally, to react to consumer's harsh complaint efficiently, it was suggested that firms should not treat consumers as harsh consumers, should react to consumers' complaints sincerely, and should take precautionary management efforts as regards consumer dissatisfaction based on better quality control of products. In addition, it was deemed necessary to formulate a management strategy to train competent consumer counselors with a high quality of counselor skill, having standardized and consistent reaction guidance toward consumer complaints and thorough knowledge of compensation rules for consumer injuries and subsequent guidance.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.96-105
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• 2024

The domestic artificially sweetened beverage market has grown rapidly in recent years, and sodas have led this growth. This study investigated consumer food purchasing behavior of artificially sweetened sodas in terms of the food health stereotypes of "vice" and "virtue"; used to denote unhealthy and healthy food purchases, respectively. The study was conducted using consumer panel data collected by the Rural Development Administration from 2017 to 2020. Given the semi-continuous nature of artificially sweetened soda purchases, Cragg's two-part model was used for the analysis. The probability of purchasing artificially sweetened sodas increased as expenditure on snacks (a vice food category) increased. However, of those panelists who purchased artificially sweetened sodas, expenditure on artificially sweetened sodas decreased with expenditure on snacks and increased with expenditure on fruits (a virtue food category). These results suggest that vicious-lifestyle consumers choose artificially sweetened sodas when they regulate eating habits, whereas virtuous-lifestyle consumers increase artificially sweetened soda expenditure for hedonic consumption to reduce guilt based on a sensible trade-off effect.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.30 no.2
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• pp.47-64
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• 2012

Purpose of this research is to analyze young job-seekers' preparation for employment process. Participants for the present research include 30 unmarried single males and females in their 20s, who are preparing for employment after graduating four-year colleges. To follow the rule of data triangulation, data includes in-depth personal interviews, field notes, memorandums, coding books, and additional questionnaires. There are 556 abstracted meaning units, 15 subcategories, 11 main categories, and final 5 themes from the data analysis. The result showed that young job-seekers were experiencing a typical cycle of preparation, attempt, failure, slump, and downgrade in job seeking standard. It is also observed that youth unemployment was a persistent phenomenon of vicious circle not easy to overcome. Especially, young job seekers were reported to restructure the perception on employment as they struggle for seeking a job, in particular, at times of experiencing hardship during the job hunting process. The interviewees responded that the possibility of getting a job declines as the job hunting period drags on eventually ending up with applying for a job of lower qualification standard.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.34-48
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• 2020

Purpose - The rapid rise of e-commerce enterprises has led to the development of the logistics industry. At the same time, some enterprises are motivated by the interests to start reducing costs and inputs, which on the contrary leads to low quality of service, thus reducing customer satisfaction. In recent years, vicious competition, violent express delivery and lack of professionalism in the logistics market have led to high annual customer complaint rate, which has resulted in the company losing many loyal customers, but also unable to obtain new customers. Therefore, to pay attention to and understand the psychological needs of customers and improve the quality of logistics distribution service has become a pressing problem for Every express company. Design/methodology - By analyzing the problems existing in logistics distribution of express companies, this paper explores various factors affecting customer satisfaction and takes consumer sentiment as a mediating variable. Through questionnaires to collect relevant data, put forward hypotheses for empirical analysis, use two different software including SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0 to analyze the information, draw conclusions and make recommendations. Findings - According to the above research results, the reliability, convenience, efficiency, professional can have a positive impact on customer satisfaction through the mediating effect of their sentiment, convenience and professional on consumer sentiment and satisfaction are more significant. Originality/value - This paper the establishment of distribution service indicators related to customer satisfaction and empirical analysis can not only enrich and supplement the distribution service quality indicator system studied by the former, but also provide a theoretical basis for future research.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.7
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• pp.11-20
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• 2014

This paper finds that the ultimate source of problems facing Korean mobile telecommunications such as excessive subsidies of handsets, waste of resources, and a vicious circle of expensive handsets and high prices for services, is bundling of handset and subscription. The analysis suggests that bundling causes consumers to confuse about prices of handsets and services, and firms focus on handset subsidy competition rather than on upgrading service qualities and lowering prices due to anti-competitive effects of bundling. Because most of the cost of bundling is passed on to consumers, the welfare of consumers decline. In particular, equality among consumers worsens due to price discriminations. To resolve these problems, unbundling of handset and subscription is a necessity. Mixed bundling allowing separate selling of handsets under bundling does not seem to work as a cure because bundling tends to be a dominant strategy. The best regulatory policy is a complete separation of handset and subscription.

• The Korean Journal of Community Living Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.103-114
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• 2005

This study aims to lay the foundations for domestic welfare through solving domestic problems. The major results of this study were as follows: First, there are many domestic violence facilities, but their poor financial condition and lack of human resources make it difficult to meet all need of shelter users. Second, people who use domestic violence shelters can't receive proper care and they go back to their homes in which violence still remains. It is like a vicious cycle making their situation worse and worse. Third, counseling given to abused women in shelters is arranged individually or in groups, but there are not enough programs providing proper care for them. On the basis of the realities mentioned above, this study was intended to pave the way to work out the improvement programs as follows: First, it is critical that the financial support from the government should be increased. Second, it is necessary to improve the training of personnel concerned with the handling of domestic violence cases. Third, it is important to make sure that children of abused women should be taken care of safely, and temporary jobs for the women should be secured. This will allow domestic violence shelters to serve their true purpose. Lastly, more adequate counseling services such as more instrumental 1366 phone lines, the development of various programs and the follow-up counseling should be reinforced.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.261-286
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• 2012

Rumors are widely prevalent in marketplace and It can be problematic and dangerous for the company's reputation and damages their image. Recently, many companies are given trouble by rumors. As getting invigorates the social media, there is high possibility to shape the vicious rumors without any confirmation whether information is true or not. It affects the companies' reputation and trust they have built for long time, also sales drop off. Despite numerous denials, the rumor persisted, keeping occur again and again all the times. Refutation purposes to decrease levels of belief in a rumor. First, establish Study 1 that a variation in identification influences the impact of a rumor on individuals' beliefs. Furthermore, we analyze the effectiveness of a refutation under varying degree of one's level of identification with the rumor object. According to research result, the response pattern of identification and disidentificaion consumers are very different. Disidentifiers, who engaged in systematic processing, believed the rumor less only when the refutation contained strong arguments. Identifiers, processing heuristically, remained unbelieving in the rumor. Study found that identification is an important moderator of consumer response to negative rumors. These defensive processes alleviate the bad influence of that information, and also can reduce the likelihood of attitude degradation.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.27-42
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• 2020

Traditional companies with offline stores were unable to secure large display space due to the problems of cost. This limitation inevitably allowed limited kinds of products to be displayed on the shelves, which resulted in consumers being deprived of the opportunity to experience various items. Taking advantage of the virtual space called the Internet, online shopping goes beyond the limits of limitations in physical space of offline shopping and is now able to display numerous products on web pages that can satisfy consumers with a variety of needs. Paradoxically, however, this can also cause consumers to experience the difficulty of comparing and evaluating too many alternatives in their purchase decision-making process. As an effort to address this side effect, various kinds of consumer's purchase decision support systems have been studied, such as keyword-based item search service and recommender systems. These systems can reduce search time for items, prevent consumer from leaving while browsing, and contribute to the seller's increased sales. Among those systems, recommender systems based on association rule mining techniques can effectively detect interrelated products from transaction data such as orders. The association between products obtained by statistical analysis provides clues to predicting how interested consumers will be in another product. However, since its algorithm is based on the number of transactions, products not sold enough so far in the early days of launch may not be included in the list of recommendations even though they are highly likely to be sold. Such missing items may not have sufficient opportunities to be exposed to consumers to record sufficient sales, and then fall into a vicious cycle of a vicious cycle of declining sales and omission in the recommendation list. This situation is an inevitable outcome in situations in which recommendations are made based on past transaction histories, rather than on determining potential future sales possibilities. This study started with the idea that reflecting the means by which this potential possibility can be identified indirectly would help to select highly recommended products. In the light of the fact that the attributes of a product affect the consumer's purchasing decisions, this study was conducted to reflect them in the recommender systems. In other words, consumers who visit a product page have shown interest in the attributes of the product and would be also interested in other products with the same attributes. On such assumption, based on these attributes, the recommender system can select recommended products that can show a higher acceptance rate. Given that a category is one of the main attributes of a product, it can be a good indicator of not only direct associations between two items but also potential associations that have yet to be revealed. Based on this idea, the study devised a recommender system that reflects not only associations between products but also categories. Through regression analysis, two kinds of associations were combined to form a model that could predict the hit rate of recommendation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, another regression model was also developed based only on associations between products. Comparative experiments were designed to be similar to the environment in which products are actually recommended in online shopping malls. First, the association rules for all possible combinations of antecedent and consequent items were generated from the order data. Then, hit rates for each of the associated rules were predicted from the support and confidence that are calculated by each of the models. The comparative experiments using order data collected from an online shopping mall show that the recommendation accuracy can be improved by further reflecting not only the association between products but also categories in the recommendation of related products. The proposed model showed a 2 to 3 percent improvement in hit rates compared to the existing model. From a practical point of view, it is expected to have a positive effect on improving consumers' purchasing satisfaction and increasing sellers' sales.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.6 no.3 s.25
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• pp.144-155
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• 2005

Since 1950s, the Korean housing market has continually experienced the chronicle lack of housing stock because of lower housing investment in comparison with a population explosion, prompt urbanization and rapid restructuring of family. The Korean housing market have thus been driven not by the pricing model by housing demand-supply chain but by the Korean housing policies focusing on the increase of housing supply and the living stability of the middle or low-income bracket. After all, repetitive economic vicious circle of housing price and the increase of unsold apartments aggravated the malfunction of the Korean housing market. Meanwhile, the Korean construction firms have exacerbated their profitability. Such terrible situations are mainly triggered by the Korean construction firms that weighed on the short-term profits and quick response of the government policy alterations rather than the prospect of housing market Therefore, this research focusing on the dynamics of housing market identified and classified the demand and supply elements that consist not only of housing system structures but also of the environmental elements that affect the structures. Based on the system thinking and traditional theory of consumer's choice, the interactions of these elements were constructed as a causal loop diagram that explains the mutual influences among housing subsystems with feedback loops. This paper describes and discusses about the causes of the dynamic changes in the Korean housing market. This study would help housing suppliers, including housing developers, construction firms, etc., to form a more comprehensive understanding on the fundamental issues that constitute the Korean housing market and thereby increasing their long term as well as minimizing the risk involved in the housing supply businesses.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.30-36
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• 2014

This study was conducted to determine the causes of unreasonable prices and small numbers of azalea cultivars by analyzing the price trends and the number of azalea cultivars announced over the last 25 years based on data from the Public Procurement Service(PPS), Korea Price Research Center and the Landscaping Tree Association(LTA)(hereinafter, officially announcing agencies and organizations) which are major references used when landscape planting is decided. The prices of azalea cultivars announced by the official announcing agencies and organizations have moved in similar patterns over the past 25 years because the prices of azalea cultivars announced by the LTA were referred to by other official announcing agencies and organizations when they officially announced the prices of azalea cultivars. The PPS set lower officially fixed prices of azalea cultivars compared to other official announcing agencies and organizations, and the reason for this is considered to be the intention of the PPS to suppress landscape tree price increases because of the government's policies to suppress price increases. The prices of azalea cultivars seem to change rapidly due to the imbalance between the demand and supply of azalea cultivars rather than the effects of consumer price fluctuation rates because the production periods of azalea cultivars are shorter when compared to other landscape trees. The prices of azalea cultivars from the official announcing agencies and organizations have been set higher than the prices in actual transactions. The reason for this is considered to be the intention of the official announcing agencies and organizations to allow landscaping companies to cover defect costs resulting from the practice of subcontracting planting work and secure profits of subcontractors for planting work. The official announcing agencies and organizations have simply announced prices of 5~8 main azalea cultivars that have been used in the past. The names of azalea cultivars being cultivated and criteria for classification have not been clear; thus, landscape designers have not written clear names of azalea cultivars to be cultivated on planting drawings as practice and landscapers planted those azalea cultivars which could be easily obtained. Therefore, it is assumed that there has been no demand for new azalea cultivars. Thus, the vicious circle in which the prices of only those azalea cultivars that were produced in the past have been announced is repeated.