• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.1-24
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• 2012

Franchises have recently emerged as the most rapidly expanding industry positioned to create a large impact in the domestic economic. The Chinese franchise industry developed rapidly in the period prior and subsequent to WTO accession with more than 50% of new franchises brands emerging since 2000. M&A transactions in the Chinese franchise industry have progressed actively. In the period from 2005-2007, due to the wholesale and retail market opening in accordance with the guidelines laid forth within the MOU by the WTO the Chinese franchise market is now the largest market in the world all despite a short history of only 20 years. The amount of franchise market research on China is disproportional to its current size and development potential. Beginning in the 1990s, market research conducted by the International Franchise Association focused on emerging markets in Eastern Europe and China. While the research dealt with the Chinese investment environment, it insufficiently explained the market region and cultural environment. The purpose of this research is (i) to investigate the determinants of the performance of franchise systems in China and (ii) new contract renewals based on performance factors. This study will complement existing research in terms of the franchisee perspective. This study may also prove of the benefit to the franchise companies entering the Chinese franchise market enabling them to develop an effective strategy. This study shows that support, incentives, and system standardization by franchisor yielded a positive effect on management performance. This is consistent with previous studies by Shin (2000) and Kim (2008) targeting Korean franchises. Therefore, in the Chinese market, the franchisor must focus on support, incentives, and system standardization rather than concentrate only on the recruitment of franchisees in order to improve revenue. Hypotheses regarding franchisor control have been dismissed in existing research, in the opinion of this study, due to their complexity and inability to control the merchant as a one-kind-assessment-standard. Our findings show that the franchisees' financial condition, management ability and entrepreneurial spirit, among franchisee's characteristics, have a positive effect on franchisor's business performance and satisfaction for the franchisee. This is consistent with previous studies on headquarters' management performance of Lussier (1996), Heo and Jang (2008), and franchisees' financial condition, management ability and entrepreneurial spirit effect on franchisor's satisfaction of Weaven and Franzer (2007), Kim (2009), Han (2009), and Yoon etc. (2008). Therefore, when permitting a franchisee, financial condition, management ability, entrepreneurship of the franchisee should be carefully considered. Among relational factors between franchisor and franchisee, trust has the positive influence on the management performance of the franchisor while conflict has a negative effect. However, trust, commitment and conflict factors have been shown not to have any impact on the satisfaction of the franchise headquarters. This result is consistent with the previous studies of Pavlou and Ba (2000), Morrison (1999), Weaven and Frazer (2007), Kim and Park (1994), Sohn (2007) which show that trust between franchisor and the franchisees have a positive effect and that conflict has a negative impact on franchisor's management performance. Other factors causing a negative effective on the franchisor's management performance are a rapid environmental changes and uncertainty in the business. This is consistent with Campbell et al (2007), Kim and Kim (2009), Han and Baek (2008). Finally, the high management performance and satisfaction of the franchise headquarters has a positive effect on the intention of franchise renewal. In the case of large markets such as China, the franchisor's strategy and the role is very important. In this study, we also investigated the characteristics of franchisor and franchisee, relationship, and environmental uncertainty affecting on the management performance and satisfaction of franchisor. Recently, Korean franchises are attempting to enter foreign markets through the rise in popularity of Korean culture and entertainment commonly referred to as the Korean wave. This study provides recommendations for Korean franchises intending on entering the Chinese market. First, in order to achieve stable profits, the franchise corporation needs to support the operation of the individual franchisee through incentives and standardization of services. Second, because trust between the franchisor and franchisee has a positive effect on management performance, on-going discussion and cooperation is necessary to reduce the level of conflict.

• Food Science and Preservation
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.810-815
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• 2008

Improving quality is a very important component of maintaining competitiveness of agricultural products. However, evaluation of 'high quality' indicates it is a very abstract concept and independent of some quality attributes, leading to differences in the perception of quality. Thus, there is a pressing need to objectively define 'high quality' and to develop basic technologies for its measurement, for application in the production, storage and distribution of competitive agricultural products. To objectively quantify apple quality, a survey was conducted on consumer preferences and awareness of quality attributes including color, taste, flavor and shape. The survey questionnaire targeted male and female adults (463 persons) ranging in age from 20 to 59 years. The questionnaire was based on purchases made at a wholesale market (50.1%) or a traditional market (18.8%). The majority of purchases were as small packets (62.0%) or as individual pieces (20.5%). Apples of moderate size (fist size, 60.5%) were preferred over small (4.3%) or large (32.6%) apples. The questionnaire provided consumer data on external quality attributes including color, shape and variety. Taste attributes were evaluated in relation to the balance between sour and sweet taste, and flavors peculiar to apples.

• Journal of Food Hygiene and Safety
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.15-18
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• 2008

For prevention of E. coli related with food poisoning including diarrhea, urinal infection, peritonitis and infant septicemia, two hundreds and twelve E. coli strains(10.3%) were isolated among 2,066 seafood products in Seoul Garak fishery market from 2005 to 2007. Most strains were isolated from fishes (7.0%), shellfishes (12.8%), crustaceans (8.7%), and molluscs (11.0%) in summer. Serotypes of E. coli isolates were determined as O6, O8, O25, O26, O27, O55, O78, O126, O158, O167, and O168. Conclusively, we knew that E. coli could be contaminated in various seafood products.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.9-19
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• 2016

In finance literature, stock liquidity showing how stocks can be cashed out in the market has received rich attentions from both academicians and practitioners. The reasons are plenty. First, it is known that stock liquidity affects significantly asset pricing. Second, macroeconomic announcements influence liquidity in the stock market. Therefore, stock liquidity itself affects investors' decision and managers' decision as well. Though there exist a great deal of literature about stock liquidity in finance literature, it is quite clear that there are no studies attempting to investigate the stock liquidity issue as one of decision making problems. In finance literature, most of stock liquidity studies had dealt with limited views such as how much it influences stock price, which variables are associated with describing the stock liquidity significantly, etc. However, this paper posits that stock liquidity issue may become a serious decision-making problem, and then be handled by using data mining techniques to estimate its future extent with statistical validity. In this sense, we collected financial data set from a number of manufacturing companies listed in KRX (Korea Exchange) during the period of 2010 to 2013. The reason why we selected dataset from 2010 was to avoid the after-shocks of financial crisis that occurred in 2008. We used Fn-GuidPro system to gather total 5,700 financial data set. Stock liquidity measure was computed by the procedures proposed by Amihud (2002) which is known to show best metrics for showing relationship with daily return. We applied five data mining techniques (or classifiers) such as Bayesian network, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, neural network, and ensemble method. Bayesian networks include GBN (General Bayesian Network), NBN (Naive BN), TAN (Tree Augmented NBN). Decision tree uses CART and C4.5. Regression result was used as a benchmarking performance. Ensemble method uses two types-integration of two classifiers, and three classifiers. Ensemble method is based on voting for the sake of integrating classifiers. Among the single classifiers, CART showed best performance with 48.2%, compared with 37.18% by regression. Among the ensemble methods, the result from integrating TAN, CART, and SVM was best with 49.25%. Through the additional analysis in individual industries, those relatively stabilized industries like electronic appliances, wholesale & retailing, woods, leather-bags-shoes showed better performance over 50%.

• Korean Journal of Environmental Agriculture
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.205-212
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• 2019

BACKGROUND: This survey conducted on agricultural products in Incheon for the past three years from 2016 to 2018 to detect residual pesticides and to monitor the use of pesticides. METHODS AND RESULTS: Residual pesticides were analyzed for a total of 5,937 agricultural products in Samsan wholesale market, traditional market and large retailers in Incheon. Samples were analyzed by multi class pesticide method using GC-MS/MS, LC-MS/MS, GC-ECD/NPD, and UHPLC. In 59 cases (1.0%) residual pesticides were detected improperly and these cases exceeded maximum residue limits (MRLs). CONCLUSION: The ratios of violative agricultural products were similar each year at approximately 1.0% per year, but the residual pesticide detection rates with the limit included in the samples were shown to be gradually decreasing to 17.9%, 12.6%, and 11.2% annually. The frequency of violative residual pesticides was high in order of Diazinon, Chlorpyrifos, Iprodione, etc. Residual pesticide monitoring might be needed in the future continuously, as violations in agricultural products distributed in Incheon are shown at a similar level every year.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.93-108
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• 2014

To support business decision making, interests and efforts to analyze and use transaction data in different perspectives are increasing. Such efforts are not only limited to customer management or marketing, but also used for monitoring and detecting fraud transactions. Fraud transactions are evolving into various patterns by taking advantage of information technology. To reflect the evolution of fraud transactions, there are many efforts on fraud detection methods and advanced application systems in order to improve the accuracy and ease of fraud detection. As a case of fraud detection, this study aims to provide effective fraud detection methods for auction exception agricultural products in the largest Korean agricultural wholesale market. Auction exception products policy exists to complement auction-based trades in agricultural wholesale market. That is, most trades on agricultural products are performed by auction; however, specific products are assigned as auction exception products when total volumes of products are relatively small, the number of wholesalers is small, or there are difficulties for wholesalers to purchase the products. However, auction exception products policy makes several problems on fairness and transparency of transaction, which requires help of fraud detection. In this study, to generate fraud detection rules, real huge agricultural products trade transaction data from 2008 to 2010 in the market are analyzed, which increase more than 1 million transactions and 1 billion US dollar in transaction volume. Agricultural transaction data has unique characteristics such as frequent changes in supply volumes and turbulent time-dependent changes in price. Since this was the first trial to identify fraud transactions in this domain, there was no training data set for supervised learning. So, fraud detection rules are generated using outlier detection approach. We assume that outlier transactions have more possibility of fraud transactions than normal transactions. The outlier transactions are identified to compare daily average unit price, weekly average unit price, and quarterly average unit price of product items. Also quarterly averages unit price of product items of the specific wholesalers are used to identify outlier transactions. The reliability of generated fraud detection rules are confirmed by domain experts. To determine whether a transaction is fraudulent or not, normal distribution and normalized Z-value concept are applied. That is, a unit price of a transaction is transformed to Z-value to calculate the occurrence probability when we approximate the distribution of unit prices to normal distribution. The modified Z-value of the unit price in the transaction is used rather than using the original Z-value of it. The reason is that in the case of auction exception agricultural products, Z-values are influenced by outlier fraud transactions themselves because the number of wholesalers is small. The modified Z-values are called Self-Eliminated Z-scores because they are calculated excluding the unit price of the specific transaction which is subject to check whether it is fraud transaction or not. To show the usefulness of the proposed approach, a prototype of fraud transaction detection system is developed using Delphi. The system consists of five main menus and related submenus. First functionalities of the system is to import transaction databases. Next important functions are to set up fraud detection parameters. By changing fraud detection parameters, system users can control the number of potential fraud transactions. Execution functions provide fraud detection results which are found based on fraud detection parameters. The potential fraud transactions can be viewed on screen or exported as files. The study is an initial trial to identify fraud transactions in Auction Exception Agricultural Products. There are still many remained research topics of the issue. First, the scope of analysis data was limited due to the availability of data. It is necessary to include more data on transactions, wholesalers, and producers to detect fraud transactions more accurately. Next, we need to extend the scope of fraud transaction detection to fishery products. Also there are many possibilities to apply different data mining techniques for fraud detection. For example, time series approach is a potential technique to apply the problem. Even though outlier transactions are detected based on unit prices of transactions, however it is possible to derive fraud detection rules based on transaction volumes.

• The Journal of Fisheries Business Administration
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• v.4 no.1_2
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• pp.19-57
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• 1973

Laver io one of the most necessary and seasonal items in Korean food from oldtimes. Laver is lagely eaten in dried form, and its supply depends entirely upon culture weeds. The history of laver culture in Korea about sixty or seventy years is older than in Japan. Significance of laver culture is divided into two aspects, one is food supply in the nation, and the other is export to other countries. Houses engaged in laver culture are about foully thousands, and laver production in 1972 is estimated as 1, 3 bitten sheets. (1 sheet is a dried laver of 20 cm sq, in the shape of paper) Especcially meaning of layer production is the concentration of labour input, and systematic management of labour. From around 1920, the method of laver culture was introduced by Japanese Imperialism for mono culture in shallow seas, and mass products of laver is provided to Japan market, DOMESTIC MARKET Fundamental consume function calculates at below, $D_{(68_71)}$=16354 $Y^{0.471}$ $P^{-1.0662}$ where D is total layer demand, Y income variable, P price variable. It means income elasticity is 476. in the whole country, and price elasticity is 1, 07. But generally income elasticity is higher in urban area than in rural area, as shown at 1, 3 in Seoul city. Expence of laver in house expenditure is mutually correlated with another expence, See Table 12 about the relative function. See Table 14 and 16 about the relation between the gathering and the changes of price in auction, wholesale and retail price support system is for two effects, one of which is constraint of the upper price, the other is rise of the lower price. Before the system control, the equation in three year average calculated as below, $Y_{b}$ ＝18, 907.7455＋15435.9364 t (r=0.89) where the origin t＝0 is the November and the units are month. Post the system control, $Y_{p}$ =30, 047.9636+1, 631.1721t (r＝0.97) therefore, this system has an effect only on the rise of lower price, Average annual margins of laver products at four market levels according to the consumer spent is below. EXPORTING MARKET Japanese demand function of laver products is, Log D=5, 289+1, 108 Log Y-1, 395 Log P (r=0.987) where D is Japanese laver demand, Y income variable, P price variable. according to which income elasticity is 1. 1 and price elasticity is 1.4. Laver production in 1970 tile highest record till then, is estimated as six billion sheets. But the recent improvement of laver culture techniques, the production of seeds and freezing storage of seeds has been stabilized. Futher new culture farms have been developed by means of break- water fences or by floating culture method. These improvements have been backed up with increased demand of laver products. Import quantity and price of Korean laver products are restrained by three organizations, that is producer, distributor and consumer. This relationship calculated by regression equation shows that import is influenced only producer organization, at the sacrifice of consumer profit. For increase to export of laver products, we urgently require to open foreign trade of laver products for Japanese consumer, .and Japan has political responsibility to solve Korean laver structure. But with long run timeseries, as regards Japanese production and import quantity, importing function shows increasing trend as below, 250 million sheets ＜3, 947.1674+0.005 $L_{g}$ ＞) 600 million sheets where $L_{q}$ is relative production quantity of laver in Japan. (unit; 100 thousand sheets) Our Export effort should be put on the highly processed products whithin the restraind quote.ote.

• KDI Journal of Economic Policy
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.3-33
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• 1991

Since the early 1980's, the Korean government has gradually been widening the Korean market to foreign consumer goods. This, combined with the increased purchasing power of the Korean consumers resulting from the continued economic growth of the country, has sparked a spectacular influx of foreign consumer goods into Korea, ranging from BMW's to chopsticks. Import of foreign consumer goods amounted to more than 6 billion dollars in 1989 and is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. The increased import of foreign consumer goods doubtlessly improved the overall welfare of the Korean consumers by providing them with a wider range of options to choose from, by lowering the prices of some of the consumer goods domestically produced, and also by forcing the producers of some Korean goods to face competition with better foreign goods, thus giving them an incentive to raise the quality of their products. However, it is agreed by most economists that this increase in general welfare has been much smaller than what they had expected at the outset. Consumer prices of most imported consumer goods are easily double the import price, and in some cases, more than treble the import prices. Further, there has not been a noticeable drop in the prices of domestically produced consumer goods. Much of the blame has been attributed to the distribution sector of Korea. The objective of this paper is to analyze the imported consumer goods distribution sector of Korea, focusing on the possible sources of the poor performance of that sector, and to make policy suggestions that could potentially increase the welfare. This paper differs from all the previous research by others on this subject in that it analyzes the imported consumer goods distribution sector of Korea as a vertical structure. The distribution sector of an imported consumer good is a vertical structure since it consists of an international market, an import stage, and domestic wholesale and retail markets, in that order vertically. Our study naturally includes the analysis of the vertical restraints as well as the analysis of the industrial organization of each horizontal stage in the vertical structure. Each horizontal component of the imported consumer goods distribution sector is basically a monopolistically competitive market differentiated by characteristics of goods and by the locations and the services of firms. Further, restrictive dealership and resale price maintenance are found to be widely in use. Our main findings are the follwing; First, most consumer goods are imported monopolistically or oligopolistically through restrictive dealership contracts between foreign producers and domestic importers. Such restrictive dealership gives importers market power in the domestic market and explains many of the large discrepancies betwen the consumer prices and the import prices of many goods. Korean anti - trust law does not cover the issues arising from the market power of an importer resulting from a restrictive dealership contract. Second, some major producers of Korean goods are also importers of foreign goods that are substitutes of their products. The import of substitutes by major domestic producers is anti - competitive because it tends to raise the prices of both domestic goods and foreign goods, and also because it reduces the incentive of the domestic producers to raise the quality of their products. Third, wholesalers and retailers widely use resale price maintenance as a price fixing mechanism, and while this is against the anti- trust law, it seldom gets noticed. Fourth, the high level of rents of real estate for commercial use works as an entry barrier to the distribution sector and results in reduced competition by the firms in that sector. Finally, there are information problems. Consumers have inferior information to firms about the quality of a foreign consumer good that they have not tried before. Such information asymmetry often enables firms to raise prices. In addition, information asymmetry between importers frequently delays the import of cheaper substitutes. In order to alleviate the problems indentified above, we suggest the following policy changes. The government should strengthen the anti - trust law and its enforcement to regulate restrictive import contracts, import of competing goods by major domestic producers, and RPM by wholesalers and retailers that is aimed at price fixing. In addition, the government should loosen its tight real estate policy to encourage investment in the distribution sector. Finally, we suggest that the import price revelation policy that has been in use for some items since 1990 be expanded to most imported consumer goods that are introduced for the first time to give consumer better information and be used only for the period of time needed to inform sufficient number of consumers.

• The Korean Journal of Pesticide Science
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.15-21
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• 2006

In order to monitor the pesticide residues in/on peppers and pepper powder and to assess their risk, pesticides in/on green pepper from 10 farmgates and fresh red pepper from 9 farmgates in Chungbuk area and pepper powder from 6 wholesale markets in Cheongju city were analyzed with a GLC and an HPLC. Also, pepper powder made by pulverization of the dried red pepper was analyzed to elucidate the change of pesticide residues in fresh red pepper by oven-drying. The number of pesticides detected from peen pepper, fresh red pepper, dried red pepper and pepper powder were 9, 12, 12, and 17, respectively, including 10 pesticides (one fungicide and nine insecticides) which were exceeded the maximum residue limits (MRLs). The exceeding rate of the MRL were higher in dried red pepper and pepper powder than in green pepper and fresh red pepper. Although some pesticides in peppers and pepper powder exceeded the MRLs, their estimated daily intake(EDI) were less than 1.6% of their acceptable daily intakes(ADIs), suggesting that it would be estimated to safe. By oven-drying of fresh red pepper at $65^{\circ}C$ for 72 hours, the weight of dried red pepper was from 1/5.9 from 1/7.8 of fresh red pepper, while the concentration of pesticide residue in dried red pepper increased from 1.7 to 8.2 times, suggesting that further reconsideration was required for the MRL of pepper powder.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
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• v.41 no.11
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• pp.1639-1644
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• 2012

This study analyzed the Importance-Performance Analysis of selective attributes of Home Meal Replacement (HMR). This study was conducted using a primary field survey on department stores and wholesale markets in Seoul and Gyeonggi province. A total of 201 out of 234 questionnaires were analyzed. First, the highest intake frequency was 1~3 times a month (100 respondents: 48%), the most common purchasing place was wholesale market (148 respondents: 73.6%), and the most cited reason for preference was convenience (115 respondents: 57.2%). According to the IPA results, selective attributes with low satisfaction and high importance in the second quadrant were 'quality', 'health', 'hygiene', 'origin of food', and 'safety'. These results suggest that the microbiological and sensory qualities of HMR production should be improved to meet consumer's expectations.