Earticle

Social Network Service (SNS) emerged to become a major platform for consumers’ social activities, affecting their choice behavior. With rapid increase in SNS adoption among consumers, firms actively apply SNS into their marketing activities and use it as an important communication medium with consumers. Particularly SNS marketing become increasingly prevalent in Chinese restaurant sector as they provide promotional information to consumers through SNS. It is urgent for firms to understand the extent of SNS impact on consumers’ choice behavior, and to understand consumers’ response toward SNS in order to develop more effective SNS marketing strategies. The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of four SNS characteristics on brand equity and purchase intention and to determine the relative importance among these four characteristics on brand equity and purchase intention. Results show that all of the characteristics have significant influence on consumers’ brand equity, and also, brand equity affects consumers’ purchase intention.

Using a sample of 180 managers in small and medium sized organizations in Chungcheong and Southern Gyeonggi Province, we proposed that official communication channel on safety issue will influence managers’ safety climate, empathy (safety climate), and eventually occupational accidents. The results supported our hypotheses, showing managers concern about their employees’ safety issue when the organization officially emphasize on safety issue. At the same time, it also tells that managers are emphatic on their employees regarding occupational accidents when it comes to safety climate.

The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of the growing activities of large purchasing enterprises on the trust of small and medium size contractors, which is mediated by 'purchase accompany activity'. This subject study includes the first and second contractor companies in Korea. The results of this study are as follow. First, the knowledge and cost price sharing activities of major purchase vendor with cooperative company had a positive effect on the trust of cooperative company, however this was not so with the information sharing activities in that case. Second, the trust of contractors on large purchasing enterprises was positively influenced by sharing activities with purchasing activities of major company. Third, the knowledge and cost price sharing activities of purchasing enterprise with contractors on the sharing activities were mediated by the trust of contracting company on the large purchase enterprise. According to this study, the mediated effect of trust relationship can influence a contracting company. Whereas preceding studies of sharing activities were conducted about unidirectional instruct of large purchase enterprises to small and medium size contracting companies, this study was conducted on bidirectional effects, which included knowledge, cost price, information sharing activities between contracting companies and large purchasing enterprises. Conclusively, this study showed the possibility of spreading cognitive and change about mutual benefits strategy between small and medium size contracting company and large purchasing enterprise.

At present, various technologies are rapidly advancing, centering on the concept of virtuality. From the technology of virtual reality, which allows us to experience the senses as if they existed, to the technology of augmented reality, which provides new information or services based on reality, they are no longer strange things for ourselves because we experience them every day and night. Even though the concept of virtual is very familiar in terms of technology, it is not known how individuals accept the concept of virtuality, how they change our way of thinking, and how their behavior changes. This study aims to approach virtuality perceived by the individual from the viewpoint of individual’s information processing. Virtuality is defined as the degree to which the situation facing an individual is far from actual reality. An individual can judge the degree of virtuality easily, which is considered to be a psychological distance which is an important factor in personal information processing. In this study, we have confirmed whether the argument is applied to the real world in the context of advertisement. According to the construal level theory, when an individual feels virtuality at a high level, the individual thinks that the situation they are facing is psychologically distant and accordingly has a high level construal. Therefore, it is more influenced by ‘advertisement emphasizing symbolic appeal' which is matching with higher level. On the other hand, when an individual feels a low level of virtuality, the individual thinks that the situation they are facing is psychologically near and thus has a low level construal. Therefore, respondents are more sensitive to functional appeal, which is related to lower level. This study has the theoretical contribution in terms that the degree of virtuality affects the psychological distance of the individual. In addition, the results of this study have practical contribution in terms of being able to be actively used in the information delivery strategy centered on the advertisement.

A key factor of competitiveness of a firm is technology innovation including product and process innovation. This paper explores the importance and performance of innovation in IT industry across manufacturing and service business. Using importance-performance analysis based on a survey of Korean manufacturing and service firms, we find the characteristics of innovation in IT under the context of industry difference. Out study indicate that Korean IT firms need to recognize the importance of technology innovation and enhance the performance in some areas. In future research, we will expand the boundary of innovation into non-technology innovation as well as service-specific innovation.

Software reliability is one of the most elementary and important problems in software development In order to find the software failure occurrence, the instantaneous failure rate function in the Poisson process can have a constant, incremental or decreasing tendency independently of the failure time. In this study, we compared the reliability performance of the software reliability model using the parameters of Pareto life distribution with the intensity decreasing pattern and the shape parameter of Erlang life distribution with the intensity increasing and decreasing pattern in the software product testing. In order to identify the software failure environment, the parametric estimation was applied to the maximum likelihood estimation method. Therefore, in this paper, we compare and evaluate software reliability by applying software failure time data. The reliability of the Erlang and Pareto life models is shown to be higher than that of the Pareto lifetime distribution model when the shape parameter is higher and the Erlang model is more reliable when the shape parameter is higher. Through this study, the software design department will be able to help the software design by applying various life distribution and shape parameters, and providing basic knowledge using software failure analysis.

Forecasting long-term mobile service demand is inevitable to establish an effective frequency management policy despite the lack of reliability of forecast results. The statistical forecasting method has limitations in analyzing how the forecasting result changes when the scenario for various drivers such as consumer usage pattern or market structure for mobile communication service is changed. In this study, we propose a dynamic model of the mobile communication service market using system dynamics technique and forecast the future demand for long-term mobile communication subscriber based on the dynamic model, and also experiment on the change pattern of subscriber demand under various scenarios.

This paper aims to research the technology level of sports industry, through analyzing the technology gap between Korea and other major countries (USA, Europe, Japan, and China), and provide a list of technologies to be prioritized for R&D investment by conducting an analysis of the strategic importance of various element technologies. The results of the analysis showed that the technology level of Korean sports industry currently stands at 70.5% of the country with the most advanced technology (the USA), and that the technology gap amounts to 4.8 years. It was also found that the USA is the country with the most advanced technology (100%) at present, followed by Europe (91.1%), Japan (88.3%), Korea (70.5%), and China (61.2%). To reduce the technology gap, we established a Strategic Zone (SZ) and derived three element technologies including ‘design and production technologies for sports and game equipment’ in the 1 st tier, nine element technologies including ‘3D motion analysis and simulation technology’ in the 2nd tier, and four element technologies including ‘fitness/health promotion and management technology’ in the 3rd tier. The significance of this research is that it included five major technology categories of the sports industry in its analysis, selected an expert on sports industry technologies using the delphi method. Therefore, the results of this study may be suitable for use as basic data in establishing the R&D strategy for the future development of the sports industry.