Industrial complexes are areas where manufacturing companies are integrated, and logistics between tenant companies play a very important role, but idle resources can occur depending on the situation if each company operates independently. Accordingly, this study aimed to reduce overall logistics costs and increase corporate productivity by looking at ways to share and utilize logistics resources such as warehouses and transportation equipment to efficiently utilize logistics resources in industrial complexes and implementing a logistics sharing platform that can share these idle resources. To this end, this study conducted a research survey on the logistics status of manufacturing companies in Ulsan-Mipo Industrial Complex, based on this analysis, the necessity of logistics resource types and utilization of industrial complex resident companies, and based on this, a service model for logistics resource sharing was studied. In addition, it was intended to analyze the operational characteristics of the existing logistics system to derive improvements and to derive optimal measures to utilize information on shared idle resources. This study confirmed the importance of sharing and utilizing idle resources to optimize logistics resources in industrial complexes, and is expected to contribute to reducing logistics costs and increasing logistics efficiency of tenant companies.
Engaging customers is a critical requirement for sharing economy platforms (SEPs) to sustain and grow their user base. Although the interactions between users who consume the service (customers) and those who provide it (peer service providers) are the primary source of SEPs’ economic value, little is known about the role of interactivity in driving customer engagement. This research links these two important concepts by theorizing and empirically testing the influence of different dimensions of interactivity (two-way communication, participation, joint problem-solving) on customer engagement (cognitive engagement, emotional engagement, behavioral engagement) in SEPs.
국내 과학관 수는 지난 10여년 동안 양적으로는 팽창하고 있으나, 대부분이 중소규모의 과학관으로 인력부족 및 과학전시 컨텐츠 부족에 따라 운영에 어려움을 겪고 있다. 이에 따라 과학관이 보유하고 있는 전시 컨텐츠의 DB구축 및 정보 공유를 통해 과학관간 상호 교환 및 교류를 촉진할 수 있는 과학관 전시 플랫폼 구축이 요구되고 있는 실정이다. 국외 선진 과학관의 경우 자연사 컨텐츠의 전산화 및 DB 구축을 통해 대국민 검색서비스를 제공하여 전시품 등을 다양하게 활용하고 있는 추세이다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 과학관에서 활용가능한 자연사 컨텐츠 중, 곤충을 중심으로 이들의 전시 컨텐츠 발굴 및 DB확보 현황과 향후 플랫폼 구축 계획에 대해 소개하고자 한다.
Introduction
In order to solve the information asymmetry and make full use of resources (unused goods, spare capacity and so on), the sharing economy, which based on the application of mobile internet technology and focused on the consumption of the right to use, is developing rapidly. Lack of trust is considered to be one of the important problems hindering the development of sharing economy. Möhlmann (2015) said that trust is a fundamental determinant of sharing economy development and ensuring shared satisfaction. At present, sharing economy enterprises have established product evaluation system and docked a third party credit rating system (i.e. Zhima Credit) to promote consumers’ trust. However, with most enterprises are becoming more and more consistent in evaluation and credit rating system, there is a new problem emerged: how to further deepen consumers’ trust in order to promote consumers’ intention to participate continuously (Zucker, 1986; Lewis & Weigert, 1985). Granovetter (1985) mentioned that trust is the product of social relationships. Botsman and Rogers (2011) made it clear that social networks play an important role in building trust in sharing economy. And people are always more willing to accept the opinions of people who have social relations with them (Lu, Zhao, & Wang, 2010). Hence, with the feature of participant of everyone in sharing economy, it is necessary to further strengthen consumers’ trust through the social interaction among consumers and between consumers and sharing platforms.
Theoretical Development
Sharing economy is based on LBS and other new technologies to realize the matching of supply and demand information across time and space. And to a certain extent, it solves the problem of information asymmetry in the era of e-commerce. Yet consumer have new requirements for product information. For example, consumers are more concerned about whether the utility of products and services can meet their needs (i.e. some consumers are more concerned about when to reach their destination than the performance of the car). But it is difficult for company to understand each everyone of consumers’ utility preference and publish product utility information based on these preferences (Xie & Gerstner, 2007). Because this kind of utility preference has the characteristic of timeliness and personalization. Therefore, consumers’ perceived uncertainty about the utility of the product will also affect the consumers’ trust. In summary, we then address these research questions:(1) can the promotion of trust between consumers and sharing platforms be achieved through the socializing of sharing platforms and then affect consumers’ intention to participate continuously; (2) if so, which type of privacy protection method and social information can promote consumer trust; and (3) does the impact of sharing platform socialization on consumer trust vary according to consumers’ concerns about the perceived utility uncertainty of the product.
Research Design
We then address these issues using experiment data. The first experiment was a 2 (social media: have, not have) x 2 (individual trust propensity: trust, not trust) between-subject design on the intention to trust sharing platform and participant continuously. Perceived utility uncertainty was added to this design as a moderator. Moreover, the second experiment was a 2 (social information type: hedonic, utilitarian) x 2 (degree of privacy protection: week, strong) between-subject design on the intention to trust sharing platform. Our scales come from existing scales and optimize it according to the characteristics of sharing economy (Schneider, 1999; Dhar & Wertenbroch, 2000; McKnight, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002).
Results and Conclusion
The results of the first experiment show that whether or not the social platform has no significant impact on the consumer trust if the individual tends to trust others. And for individuals who tends to do not trust others, they are more likely to trust socialized sharing platforms. The higher the consumer perceived utility uncertainty is, the higher (lower) trust of the consumer platform in the socialized (not socialized) sharing platform. For the second experiment results, in the context of sharing economy, the utilitarian information has a greater positive impact on the consumer trust than the hedonic information. In addition, the stronger the privacy protection of sharing platforms, the higher the trust of consumes. This study makes several academic contributions. First, we extend the topic of socialization to sharing economy context. Second, we add the perceived utility uncertainty as a moderator, and supplement the role of perceived uncertainty. This research also provides several practical implications. First, sharing platform can promote their consumers’ trust by establishing their own social platform. This platform can be used as a differentiated competitive strategy for sharing platform. Second, sharing platform should guide consumers to share utilitarian information (i.e. weather for specific place or real time traffic) to improve consumer satisfaction. Third, sharing platform can access consumer preference information through this social platform for further product development and classification.
Introduction
In order to solve the information asymmetry and make full use of resources (unused goods, spare capacity and so on), the sharing economy, which based on the application of mobile internet technology and focused on the consumption of the right to use, is developing rapidly. Lack of trust is considered to be one of the important problems hindering the development of sharing economy. Möhlmann (2015) said that trust is a fundamental determinant of sharing economy development and ensuring shared satisfaction. At present, sharing economy enterprises have established product evaluation system and docked a third party credit rating system (i.e. Zhima Credit) to promote consumers’ trust. However, with most enterprises are becoming more and more consistent in evaluation and credit rating system, there is a new problem emerged: how to further deepen consumers’ trust in order to promote consumers’ intention to participate continuously (Zucker, 1986; Lewis & Weigert, 1985).
Granovetter (1985) mentioned that trust is the product of social relationships. Botsman and Rogers (2011) made it clear that social networks play an important role in building trust in sharing economy. And people are always more willing to accept the opinions of people who have social relations with them (Lu, Zhao, & Wang, 2010). Hence, with the feature of participant of everyone in sharing economy, it is necessary to further strengthen consumers’ trust through the social interaction among consumers and between consumers and sharing platforms.
Theoretical Development
Sharing economy is based on LBS and other new technologies to realize the matching of supply and demand information across time and space. And to a certain extent, it solves the problem of information asymmetry in the era of e-commerce. Yet consumer have new requirements for product information. For example, consumers are more concerned about whether the utility of products and services can meet their needs (i.e. some consumers are more concerned about when to reach their destination than the performance of the car). But it is difficult for company to understand each everyone of consumers’ utility preference and publish product utility information based on these preferences (Xie & Gerstner, 2007). Because this kind of utility preference has the characteristic of timeliness and personalization. Therefore, consumers’ perceived uncertainty about the utility of the product will also affect the consumers’ trust.
In summary, we then address these research questions:(1) can the promotion of trust between consumers and sharing platforms be achieved through the socializing of sharing platforms and then affect consumers’ intention to participate continuously; (2) if so, which type of privacy protection method and social information can promote consumer trust; and (3) does the impact of sharing platform socialization on consumer trust vary according to consumers’ concerns about the perceived utility uncertainty of the product.
Research Design
We then address these issues using experiment data. The first experiment was a 2 (social media: have, not have) x 2 (individual trust propensity: trust, not trust) between-subject design on the intention to trust sharing platform and participant continuously. Perceived utility uncertainty was added to this design as a moderator. Moreover, the second experiment was a 2 (social information type: hedonic, utilitarian) x 2 (degree of privacy protection: week, strong) between-subject design on the intention to trust sharing platform. Our scales come from existing scales and optimize it according to the characteristics of sharing economy (Schneider, 1999; Dhar & Wertenbroch, 2000; McKnight, Choudhury, & Kacmar, 2002).
Results and Conclusion
The results of the first experiment show that whether or not the social platform has no significant impact on the consumer trust if the individual tends to trust others. And for individuals who tends to do not trust others, they are more likely to trust socialized sharing platforms. The higher the consumer perceived utility uncertainty is, the higher (lower) trust of the consumer platform in the socialized (not socialized) sharing platform. For the second experiment results, in the context of sharing economy, the utilitarian information has a greater positive impact on the consumer trust than the hedonic information. In addition, the stronger the privacy protection of sharing platforms, the higher the trust of consumes.
This study makes several academic contributions. First, we extend the topic of socialization to sharing economy context. Second, we add the perceived utility uncertainty as a moderator, and supplement the role of perceived uncertainty. This research also provides several practical implications. First, sharing platform can promote their consumers’ trust by establishing their own social platform. This platform can be used as a differentiated competitive strategy for sharing platform. Second, sharing platform should guide consumers to share utilitarian information (i.e. weather for specific place or real time traffic) to improve consumer satisfaction. Third, sharing platform can access consumer preference information through this social platform for further product development and classification.
The marketing practice in several industries, including fashion and luxury goods, increasingly relies on the utilization of shared product platforms across different brands (Halman, Hofer, & Van Vuuren, 2003; Krishnan & Gupta, 2003; Luo, 2011; Sawnhey, 1998). For instance, manufacturers of products ranging from automobiles (di Benedetto 2012) to wines (Beverland, 2004) offer consumers several products under different brand names, but partly based on the same product components or architecture. However, while such platform branding practices have been increasingly adopted by companies and studied by marketing research, less is known about the consumer behavior implications of such branding. In particular, the few extant studies on the consumer behavior implications (e.g., Sullivan, 1998; Strach and Everett, 2006; Olson, 2008) do not take into account consumer heterogeneity, i.e., the potentially different behavior towards platform brands by different consumers. This issue is, in essence, the focus of the present study.
Specifically, as the focal consumer trait, we concentrate on the role that consumers’ general cognitive ability, i.e. intelligence, may play in their choices of platform vs. independent brands. While intelligence has been shown to affect consumers’ financial decisions in the stock market (Grinblatt, Keloharju, & Linnainmaa, 2011, 2012), we are unaware of studies that would have directly examined the link between intelligence and brand choices in the product market. Our contribution is to report such an investigation with over 200,000 consumers’ purchase choices of cars in Finland.
As the car brands studied differ in price points, higher-income individuals can, on the baseline, better afford the higher-premium platform brands (and, possibly, independent brands). Intelligence, in turn, correlates with income, possibly giving rise to a spurious, overall correlation between intelligence and higher-premium platform brands through income. Therefore, to study the ceteris paribus association between intelligence and brand choice, independent of income, we estimated an ANCOVA of the mean intelligence of individuals possessing cars of different brands, controlling for income and the other control variables. As to results, the least squares mean intelligence of individuals possessing higher-premium platform brands was lower (M = 5.55, s.e. = 0.01) than individuals possessing lower-premium platform brands (M = 5.64, s.e. = 0.01; pairwise comparison significant at p < .0001 level). Furthermore, the mean intelligence of independent, non-platform brand owners resulted even higher (M = 5.76, s.e. = 0.02) than that of the low-premium platform brand owners (M = 5.64, s.e. = 0.01; comparison significant at p < .0001 level). Ordered probit regression analysis of purchased brands, provided consistent results. In summary, the results support our hypotheses that controlling for income, greater intelligence is associated with the preference for lower-premium platform brands over higher-premium platform brands and, further, with the preference for independent platform brands over platform brands.
Managerially, the results demonstrate that smarter consumers may have suspicions towards higher-priced platform brands. Correspondingly, such consumers may be more predisposed either to seek lower-priced brands of equal quality, or to pursue brands of independent posture. To attract these consumers to higher-premium platform brands, marketers may need to provide convincing information on which tangible quality aspects are distinctive in the products of the higher-premium platform brand, as opposed to the lower-premium brand that is based on the same platform. At the same time, the independent brands may face a harder marketing task among less smart consumers, who seem to have more trust in the larger platform constellations of brands.
The importance of Social Networking Services (SNS) has increased in recent years because consumers are able to communicate with each other to share their information and experiences via SNS. This allows to easily distribute critical information and is beneficial to other potential consumers. Current studies confirm the important role of social media so that firms can get valuable information to respond to the heterogeneous customers’ needs through SNS (e.g., Rishika, Kumar, Janakiraman, & Bezawada, 2013). This paradigm shift allows firms to consider the important role of SNS on the current fashion market. A firm communicates with consumers sharing their opinions, experiences, and feedback existing on SNS, called social platform, which provides valuable information to respond to consumers’ needs. In the last decades, rapid advancements in technology and customer demands pushed firms to collaborate with outside partners to collect information, creating valuable products or services. In such competitive environments, customers’ involvement is increasingly important because integrating external sources of knowledge from them can result in major advantages for the firm (Nooteboon, 1999). Further, Von Hippel (1986) emphasizes the importance of the participation of the lead users whose present strong needs will become general in a marketplace months or years in the future. They have the tendency to adopt new products earlier than normal customers. According to Von Hippel (2006), lead users may provide valuable ideas for the firm which results in novel products. Lead users can diffuse product information to other customer groups and may play a pivotal role between the firm and traditional customer groups. Likewise, the fashion leaders in the fashion industry have an important role because firms are able to know future market trends from them. Further, the role of fashion leaders is much more important because of the characteristics of the fashion industry. It is very difficult to foresee a trend as customer demand changes rapidly and becomes more heterogeneous. Fashion leaders purchase new fashion products quicker than other people, are more interested in clothing, and invest more in fashion than the general consumer (Goldsmith, Freiden, & Kilsheimer, 1993). Thus, fashion leaders hold an important role as a source of information and for the word-of-mouth effect in the fashion market (Kim & Hong, 2011). The fashion information that fashion leaders deliver builds more trust and interest than direct fashion advertisement or PR, and they have an important influence on the spread of new fashion styles (Vernette, 2004). Additionally, the effects of online word-of-mouth are different from the traditional word-of-mouth effects because there are numerous senders and receivers, and conversations last much longer. Moreover, viral content that includes vivid visual images can especially be influential on network participants (Kulmala, Mesiranta, & Tuominen, 2013; Wolny & Mueller, 2013). We argue that fashion leaders may have a strong impact on leading a trend in the current fashion industry and influence the consumers who share information and experiences with them on fashion platforms to purchase products. Thus, the purpose of our study is to examine the role of fashion leaders in influencing purchase intention of the potential customers who are using the fashion platforms to take information from them. Further, we will outline how fashion leaders influence the creation of valuable fashion platforms and valuable information through sharing their knowledge through fashion platforms. Online surveys were administrated to conduct empirical analyses for this study. Taking the gender and age characteristics of interest based SNS users into consideration, the research sample concentrated on female users in their teenage to 30s, who had the experience with fashion social platforms. The main research results are as follows. First, we found that fashion leaders create valuable information for the other users to visit fashion platforms, providing correct, trendy and trustworthy information to other users. Second, the quality of information and value of a fashion platform that are created by fashion leaders positively influence the users when considering their future purchase decision making and recommendations to other potential consumers to visit the fashion platform. We have some implications in our study. First, we contribute by finding a factor to explain how the value of social fashion platforms can be created and how important the value of information provided by fashion leaders is in the fashion industry in Korea. We found that the role of fashion leaders in influencing a trend of current fashion in the Korean industry is important. The advent of social media, such as SNS, allows us to explain how one-way communication with consumers to set up a firm’s marketing strategy is limited. As the results of this study are specific to the fashion industry, they can be used as a fundamental study to understand the role of fashion leaders to create value on social platforms and share valuable information to normal users. Moreover, this study can contribute to the understanding how social platforms affect the fashion industry through two-way communication to the potential customers using the fashion leaders. It is important for fashion corporations that are interested in social services to have a valuable knowledge of social platform users. Therefore, fashion marketers who are attempting to utilize social platforms can use this study as preliminary data to understand fashion social platform users, who are the potential consumers.
These days, thanks to lots of smart devices and advanced communication technologies, consumer’s recognition and relations have been changed. They, beyond relying on information and services which are produced by experts, produce information and knowledge by themselves via SNS or web that they want to know. As consumer’s recognition is changing like this, SNS is evolving into social platform. Therefore, this paper is intended to clarify overall relationship between network characteristics in social platform, knowledge sharing, social capital, social innovation and customer’s value. This paper has clarified influences between variables related to consumer’s behaviors in social platform and the results are summarized as following: First, network characteristics in social platform are found to positively affect knowledge sharing efforts of social platform. Second, knowledge sharing has been found to positively affect social capital and innovation in social platform. However, enjoyment in helping others i.e a sub variable is found to positively affect social capital and innovation through anticipated reciprocal relationships. Third, social capital and innovation in social platform have affected customer value in social platform positively. Consequently, this paper is intended to solve various problems found from overall societies and industries through social innovation and also to advance them. For these purposes, social platform is believed to prompt sharing idea and knowledge based on interactions between users and social relationship. These actions become social capitals resulting in social innovation. Moreover, these would create new businesses and marketing opportunities across various areas in the processes that innovative activities form customer values.
Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the keyword, emotion, in many areas including information technology. Previous research mostly used emotion as the input of the contents or to present the changing contents based on the user's emotional states. In this research, a new platform that allows sharing each other's emotional state and a couple of prototype contents utilizing the platforms are developed. There are two different ways to build such emotion sharing platforms either sharing the emotional states in real-time or not. We used stateless server for the asynchronous emotion sharing, while stateful server is utilized for the real-time emotion sharing. This paper explains the systems architecture of both stateful and stateless servers and describes the prototype applications. Content developers should be able to utilize the platforms developed in this paper.
This study aims to examine the influence of attitudes on customers’ intention to participate in online fashion sharing. A framework was proposed to investigate the relationships between consumer motivation, consumer attitude, and purchase intention in the manner of adopting a fashion-sharing platform. Consumer motivations are divided into three categories: utilitarian, hedonic, and ecological. The moderating effects of product replacement cycle (PRC) on consumer attitude and purchase intention are also investigated. Data collection was developed using a web-based survey where 180 consumer respondents from South Korea participated. The results of our analysis indicate that consumers’ hedonic and ecological motivations are positively related to favorable consumer attitudes, even when consumers’ utilitarian motivation is denied. Consumer attitude is also positively related to purchase intention in the fashion-sharing platform. A moderating effect of PRC is recorded between consumer attitude and purchase intention based on high and low PRC, as well as the effect of ecological motivation and consumer attitude on high PRC. This study enhances knowledge of consumer motivational factors in a fashion-sharing platform and provides insights for service providers to help them improve their target marketing.
The objectives of this research are to suggest the basic plans for earthquake data construction using data sharing platform, and to design the earthquake information contents based on stakeholder's needs. To strengthen the earthquake disaster response capacity, customized contents for public and local/central government use and specific sharing platform are developed. Finally, the step-by-step data sharing roadmap is suggested.