The purpose of this research was to examine simultaneously health halo and health horn effects across two fast food restaurant brands that have healthful or unhealthful images (i.e., McDonald's and Subway). Specifically, we investigated the moderating effects of nutrition information disclosure and dietary restraint on behavioral intention of four menus from the two brands. Two menus from the McDonald’s and two menus from the Subway, respectively, had been selected as stimuli, and each menu represented health halo confirmation (the Roast-Chicken sandwich) / disconfirmation (the Italian-Spicy sandwich), and health horn confirmation (the Big Mac burger) / disconfirmation (the McSpicy-Cajun burger), respectively. This study employed a mixed factorial design: 2 (nutrition information: present vs. absent) X 2 (dietary restraint: restrained eater vs. unrestrained eater) X 4 (menu type: a health halo or a health horn (for the Subway and the McDonald’s with objective healthfulness). The survey was conducted on October 11- 17, 2016, by a research company, Macromill EMBRAIN in Korea, which possessed more than 1 million panel members. Cell sizes were 149 and 146 for the between-subjects factor. Participants were randomly assigned to one of the nutrition information disclosure experimental conditions (either present or absent) and presented with all four menus. The results showed that the behavioral intentions of all three menus, except health horn disconfirmation menu, were decreased. In particular, the effect size of health halo disconfirmation menu (decrease in behavioral intention) was the greatest. There was no difference in the behavioral intention of four menus between the restrained eater and unrestrained eater. Thus, brands positioned as healthy should well manage the expectation levels of their customers. A brand positioned as healthy, such as the Subway, has to manage the health expectation of its customer not get too high, or the brand has to continuously strive to satisfy its client's expectations. A brand positioned as unhealthy (eg, McDonald’s) needs to actively develop low-calorie menus, healthy menus or similar side dishes. Although indulgent menus would account for the majority of the revenue, existence of healthy menus / side dishes would lessen the guilty feelings of the customers of the restaurant and the brand. This is the first study which identified both the health halo effect and the health horn effect on restaurant brand image. The results of this study confirm the need to provide nutrition information on dining out menus and would help consumers choose healthy menus.

A study of the comparison of customers' satisfaction and loyalty at McDonald's two types of outlets is presented. The objective of this study is to test correlation among selection attributes, customer satisfaction and loyalty of customers patronizing two types of Mcdonald's restaurants - stand alone and co-branded, as Mcdonald's is known to be actively participating in co-branding with discount stores such as E-Mart. In order to measure customer loyalty, benchmark scores from customers showing extreme satisfaction are compared to the mean scores of total sample customers at each outlet. Meeting or exceeding benchmarking scores does not automatically bring in and create loyal customers but in doing so will certainly help build up strong customer relationship which will create additional loyalty. Marketers should be well aware that statistically significant difference do exist between these two groups of customers and should take into consideration these findings in opening up new outlets or renovating existing outlets.

Salt is the major factor limiting crop productivity in saline soils. Development of genetic basis of high salt-tolerant rice is necessary to satisfy urgent needs in rice breeding. In this study, 295 rice accessions from a Korean authentic core set were used to identify the evolution associated genes regarding salt tolerance. By using McDonald-Kreitman Test (MKT), we detected orthologous genes in rice (Oryza sativa) using Brachypodium as an outgroup to investigate fast evolved genes that express differentially based on distinct phenotypic groups. Three groups which represented the salt sensitive (group 1), salt medium tolerant (group 2) and salt tolerant (group 3) were separated and each group was examined with the outgroup in neutral and non-neutral polymorphism together with the divergence levels. Total 53 fast evolutionary genes that have a positive selection with FDR ≤ 0.05 were found in the three groups. Among them, 15, 31 and 7 genes were included exclusively in group 1, 2 and 3, respectively. Annotation of these genes showing the predicted functions were checked. Two genes were found to be related to high salt tolerance based on the previous studies. Besides, association study of the candidate gene alleles and salt tolerance phenotype was carried out, indicating that these genes were correlated with salt tolerance. All these result support that using this type of evolution study, we may find some important candidate genes which are related to important traits in rice, such as the salt tolerance, providing important information for future gene based molecular breeding and functional analysis in rice.