Earticle

Item-based collaborative filtering (IBCF) is an important technology that is widely used in recommender system of online shopping malls. It uses historical information to compute item-item similarity and make predictions. However, in offline shopping each customer’s purchasing pattern can be occurred continuously and repeatedly due to time and space constraints contrast to online shopping. Those facts can make IBCF to have limitations from being applied to offline shopping malls directly. In order to improve the quality of recommendations made by IBCF in offline shopping mall, we propose an ensemble approach that considers both item-item similarity of IBCF and each customer’s purchasing patterns which are modeled by item networks. Our experimental results show that this approach produces recommendation results superior to those of existing works such as pure IBCF or bestseller approaches.

This study aims to analyze which subsidiary configuration strategy is more effective under uncertainty especially technology base multinational corporations (henceforth MNCs). In previous studies real option theory scholars argue that high breadth subsidiary configuration is most effective strategy because that provides flexibility to MNCs global network. In this study I want unveil more various types of uncertainty such as technology and learning uncertainty which are more important for technology base firm and further more examine the effect of MNCs subsidiary configuration on firm R&D performance each uncertainty case. Empirical study is performed by negative binominal model based on Japanese 108 multinational corporations. The result shows that under technology uncertainty, high breadth subsidiary configuration is better for firm R&D performance but under learning uncertainty high depth subsidiary configuration is better. Thus, the effects of MNCs subsidiary configuration on firm value can differ by types of uncertainty.

This research conducted empirical and comparative study following interview concerning the relationship of acceptance attitudes and expected effects of the teleworking between Korean and Canada organizations. Independent variable was acceptance attitude, and the expected effect as dependent variable. Totally, 201 responded questionnaires (Korea : 118, Canada : 83) were analyzed for multiple regression and mean difference between groups. On January 1, 2015, Canada had agreed FTA (free trade agreement) with Korea. Therefore, many organizations can have opportunities for sharing hands in social infrastructures and business area. As a result, the research found out that teleworking can positively improve employee’s quality of life, efficiency of works. Moreover, respondents informed us that it may give us national and social cost saving. The BYOD (bring your own device) will be helpful to make employees do more active communication. This comparative research expects that two countries have some insights to cooperate in smart work or teleworking. In addition, several Korean companies can have chances to export IT technologies to Canada market.

Industrial Revolution is a concept and a development that has fundamentally changed our society and economy. Industry 4.0 focuses on the end-to-end digitization of all physical assets and integration into digital ecosystems with value chain partners. At present, we find ourselves at the beginning of this fourth stage, which is characterized by so-called “Cyber-Physical Systems”. These systems are a consequence of the far-reaching integration of production, sustainability and customer-satisfaction forming the basis of intelligent network systems and processes. If South Korea ran toward global ICT with the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, North Korea has adhered to a unique Juche science and technology. ICT in South Korea and North Korea seems very difficult to find common interests. However, as seen in the Internet and intranets, information and communication technology can find similarities in many areas than in general science and technology. There are many differences not only in the level of ICT and science and technology but also in the direction. And IT terminology and all technologies are also different. What are we preparing for the unification of North and South Korea? If we look at the science and technology sector at present, there seems to be no systematic preparation by the government. South Korea and North Korea need to be prepared for science and technology cooperation. First, it is necessary to understand the exact situation of North Korea's science and technology. In this study, we will perform research to establish mid and long term plans for revitalization of ICT cooperation between the two Koreas. In this study, we will determine the extent to which the two Koreas utilize ICT based on available ICT capabilities and technologies. To do this, we conducted research to measure and evaluate the ICT development index of North Korea using ICT international index.

Due to the development of technology even in learning and education area, many studies have begun to make a new attempts to research by using SNS, breaking away from traditional learning methods. However, the limitations of these studies are restricted only to the use of wireless Internet and writing on Web sites. This study aims to conduct a research on English learning activities that utilize various technologies such as Bigdata, Facebook, Social Network Services (SNS) and English applications. In addition, this study looks into how these modern technologies can be integrated in the classrooms and which activities can be applied in the English classroom. This research is to suggest effective English learning methods through a thorough investigation on the effectivity of various technologies based on the Web 2.0 such as Flickr, blogs, MySpace, and online discussion board within the context of the English learning. To verify the effect of the study, the subjects are divided into experimental and control group. The experiment is proceeded with pre- and post-test. The experimental group is designed to verify the effects using SNS tools such as Facebook, Bigdata, and Online Massive Learning. A survey is conducted to determine the preference of utilizing social networking sites and to analyze the effects in class. The result is that the average scores for experimental group have improved more than the average of control group. The comparison of pre and post-test of the experimental group shows that the significance of the higher and median group was statistically significant at the p<0.01.

Finding a root cause is an essential step to solving a complex problem. Some previous studies have used the Delphi method for gathering opinions about root causes from geographically dispersed experts. However, we assert that complicated problems such as an industry ecosystem would make a general type of the Delphi method less practical because of too much psychological burden on study participants. In this study we present a preliminary list-based Delphi study method for identifying a root cause. This method was used to identify a root cause and draw a causal map for the information industry ecosystem problems.

The ability of smartphones to facilitate various services like mobile banking, e-commerce and mobile payments has made them part of consumers’ lives. Conjoint analysis (CA) is a marketing research approach used to assess how consumers’ preferences for products or services develop. The potential applications of CA are numerous in consumer electronics, banking and insurance services, job selection and workplace loyalty, consumer packaged goods, and travel and tourism. Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) analysis is the most commonly used CA approach in marketing research. The purpose of this study is to utilise CBC analysis to investigate the relative importance of smartphone attributes that influence consumer smartphone preference. An experiment was designed using Sawtooth CBC Software. 326 students attempted the online survey. Utility values were derived by Hierarchical Bayes (HB) estimation and used to explain consumers’ smartphone preferences. All the six attributes used for the study were found to significantly influence smartphone preference. Smartphone brand was the most important, followed by the price, camera, RAM, battery life, and storage. This study is one of the first to use Sawtooth CBC analysis to assess consumer smartphone preference based on the six attributes. We provide implications for the development of new smartphones based on attributes.

We question whether Korean IT managers consider real options to reduce risks of cloud service implementation. This work investigates the impact of technology risk, relationship risk, economy risk, security risk upon the intention of IT managers to utilize abandon & expansion options. We also analyze moderation effect of centralization level of decision making between these risks and the utilization of real options. Using the survey questionnaire, we empirically find that technology risk, relationship risk and security risk have significant effect upon abandon option and technology risk, relationship risk, and economy upon expansion option. We also find the evidence that centralization level moderates some risks and the direction of moderation effect is to offset the effect of risks on intention to utilize real options.

Smart factory has been regarded as a big opportunity for manufacturing industries. However, little literature has been studied for the current status of Korean smart factory. Our paper tries to find gaps between research and real world by summarizing the recent literature and cases in Korean context. As the present level of smart factory introductions in Korean small manufacturing firms is lower than what a variety of literature says, our study points out that more efforts, investments and government support are required to catch up with the knowhow and technologies of developed countries although real-time control, enhanced productivity have been obtained. In future research, we will continue the smart factory study with the accumulated real data.

As the digital economy goes global, firms are trying to find suppliers that can address their managerial goals and strategies. The alternatives are not confined to domestic firms. Firms have been trying to connect to foreign partners worldwide. Although offshore outsourcing grants firms various benefits, they present big cultural challenges. However, there is little research on the impact of cultural or country factors on outsourcing. The goal of this paper is to synthesize the outsourcing success literature and develop propositions for outsourcing success in the context of offshore outsourcing. This paper proposes that cultural effects should be included in evaluating the success of offshore outsourcing. Knowledge sharing and the scope of outsourcing are adopted in the base outsourcing success model from previous literature. In the extended model partnership quality is included as a mediator and organizational capability and outsourcing relationship type are also included as moderator. Finally, the integrated framework of offshore outsourcing success includes cultural factors as moderators of the relationships between outsourcing success antecedents and the success of offshore outsourcing. Reasoning for propositions, managerial implications, and future research directions are discussed.

This paper tried to examine the effect of the policy on companies’ CSR activities and what kind of a role does CSR have in determining Customer Loyalty in Indonesia. This paper is divided into two parts, the first part is designed to find out whether the Indonesian government law has successfully made the companies perform better CSRs. We do this by using the ICGC Index of the companies registered and comparing their scores before and after the implementation of the policy. We will then use the paired sample t-test to find out if there is an increase in the overall scores of the companies and/or only the natural resource-related companies. The result showed an upward trend in the ICGC scores for all the companies which the Indonesian government law is intended to. In the second part, Manfred Schwaiger’s components and parameters of corporate reputation was referred and used on Indonesian customers. We asked participants whether they think natural resource-related companies perform better CSRs and then we also tried to find out what factors really affect their loyalty towards companies or brands by conducting Multiple Regression Analysis. From the 4 factors that we have prepared, which consist of Performance, CSR, Quality and Attractiveness, Quality is the most influential towards determining our survey participants’ Customer Loyalty. Surprisingly, CSR is insignificant in directly influencing Customer Loyalty. But, our research did find out that CSR does moderate Quality and Performance in their relationship with Customer Loyalty. Meaning that CSR has no effect in a direct relationship but it can increase the effect of Quality and Performance in determining Customer Loyalty. Unfortunately, CSR has no moderating effect in increasing the effect of Attractiveness towards Customer Loyalty.

It is urgent to prepare countermeasures for traffic congestion problems of Korea's metropolitan area where central functions such as economic, social, cultural, and education are excessively concentrated. Most users of public transportation in metropolitan areas including Seoul use the traffic cards. If various information is extracted from traffic big data produced by the traffic cards, they can provide basic data for transport policies, land usages, or facility plans. Therefore, in this study, we extract valuable information such as the subway passengers' frequent travel patterns from the big traffic data provided by the Seoul Metropolitan Government Big Data Campus. For this, we use a Hadoop (High-Availability Distributed Object- Oriented Platform) to preprocess the big data and store it into a Mongo database in order to analyze it by a sequential pattern data mining technique. Since we analysis the actual big data, that is, the traffic cards' data provided by the Seoul Metropolitan Government Big Data Campus, the analyzed results can be used as an important referenced data when the Seoul government makes a plan about the metropolitan traffic policies.

This study sheds light on the source data quality in big data systems. Previous studies about big data success have called for future research and further examination of the quality factors and the importance of source data. This study extracted the quality factors of source data from the user’s viewpoint and empirically tested the effects of source data quality on the usefulness and utilization of big data analytics results. Based on the previous researches and focus group evaluation, four quality factors have been established such as accuracy, completeness, timeliness and consistency. After setting up 11 hypotheses on how the quality of the source data contributes to the usefulness, utilization, and ongoing use of the big data analytics results, e-mail survey was conducted at a level of independent department using big data in domestic firms. The results of the hypothetical review identified the characteristics and impact of the source data quality in the big data systems and drew some meaningful findings about big data characteristics.

The development of information technology are leading to the rapid evolution of SNS (Social Networking Services) in various directions and industries. Initially, SNS have been used as the form of networking between user’s groups. Currently SNS has been developed towards multiple purposes and platforms such as the promotion and the advertising of a company. There are many SNSs including QQ, Weibo, and Wechat and so on in China. However, the use of companies in terms of advertising and information sharing with the customers do not meet the trend in China. Especially, there were little researches for Chinese travel agencies how to utilize SNS for attracting new customers and making them contribute to the firm’s performance. In this study, we try to investigate the impact of the firm’s characteristics and the usage of SNS on the performance of Chinese travel agencies. Based on Top 100 China travel agencies in 2009, we analyzed the relationships between firm’s characteristics and the usage of SNS, and firm’s performances in 2013. We expect that our study can contribute to the increasing academic and practical needs on the empirical evidence of the impacts of the SNS utilizations on the firm’s performance.