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The purpose of this study is to examine customer intentions to download mobile applications in the hospitality industry. Even though major hospitality companies offer the mobile applications, many customers have not utilized them. The results showed what encouraged customers to download mobile applications in the hospitality industry.

The Technology Acceptance Model was applied for this research to explain customer intentions. College students were the target population of this study because they understand and adopt the technology well. Therefore, mobile applications will become a popular way to purchase goods and services when university students will have purchasing power.

Even though major hospitality companies offer mobile applications, more than a half of respondents responded that they had not used mobile applications from the hospitality firms. The results showed that promotion information was not an only reason to download mobile applications; however, the results also showed that consumers who enjoy using smartphones and who are confident in themselves are more likely to download the mobile applications.

The data were collected in a university; therefore, generalizability is one of the limitations of this research. Multiple regressions only verify the relationship between dependant and independent variables. University students may not have a chance to plan their trips so they may not need the mobile applications.

This study employed the TAM to examine the reasons why customers download mobile applications offered by companies in the hospitality industry. Literature discussing mobile applications in the hospitality industry is very scarce. This research will assist managements in utilizing their mobile applications.

Respondents from five Asian countries were surveyed in terms of their consumer ethnocentrism, animosity, and attribution towards the USA and Japan in the context of the Asian economic crisis. The results indicated that the more severely hit a country was, the more ethnocentric respondents were. In general, animosity towards the USA was higher than towards Japan with regard to the Asian crisis. Koreans held the greatest stable animosity towards the Japanese because of the atrocities experienced during the Second World War. Respondents attributed the blame of the Asian crisis more to themselves. They also felt that they and the Japanese could have controlled the turn of events during the crisis. Implications arising from the findings are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an empirical model to assess the separate effect of the government's research and development (R&D) policy program in small and medium enterprise (SME) performance.

The paper reviews the R&D related papers and finds out the specific aspects of the Korean R&D policy program, classifying every R&D policy program and giving them unique names such as funds, technology and human resource support. Finally, the paper provides the whole empirical model and research questions for future studies.

First, the paper suggests the research model and several questions about whether the direct government funding of R&D policy program has had an effect on SMEs' business performance. Second, the interaction of direct government R&D funding, technology and human resource support are compared. Finally, a research model is suggested with proper research methodology.

Owing to the research purpose, the paper ends with the suggestion of an empirical model. Panel data needs to be applied to verify the suggested model.

There are various papers regarding the effect of R&D investment from private and public sectors, but few papers exist about the causal relationship between the government R&D policy program and SMEs' performance.

In this study, the authors extend upon Brockman et al. (2008), who provide evidence that managers opportunistically accelerate bad news prior to share repurchases, but provide limited evidence that managers withhold good news until after repurchases. The authors examine management forecasts surrounding share repurchases in periods when companies must disclose detailed repurchase information. The authors argue these disclosures increase managers' legal and reputation risks of accelerating bad news, but have a lesser effect on delaying good news.

First, the authors examine whether managers alter the information released to the market before buying back shares by comparing managerial forecasts made within 30 days before the beginning of a repurchasing period with those made outside of this window. Second, the authors examine whether managers are more likely to provide good news forecasts, in terms of both magnitude and frequency, after buying back shares. Lastly, the authors examine the impact of CEO stock ownership on managerial forecasting behavior surrounding share buybacks.

Consistent with the authors’ hypotheses and contrary to Brockman et al. (2008), the authors find limited evidence that the likelihood or magnitude of bad news forecasts is greater in the period before share buybacks. Instead, the authors document that the frequency and magnitude of good news forecasts increase in periods following share buybacks and that these associations are positively moderated by managerial equity incentives. The authors also find that the withholding of good news is associated with lower average repurchase prices and greater repurchase volume. The authors further show that, when litigation risk is greater, managers are less likely to accelerate bad news prior to repurchases and more likely to withhold good news until after. Overall, the study results are consistent with managers balancing the benefits of opportunistic repurchase behavior with the costs.

This study contributes to the management forecast and share repurchase literatures by providing evidence consistent with managers opportunistically releasing earnings forecasts in the period after buying back shares. Most importantly, the authors show that after the rule revision, managers refrain from actively disclosing bad news that carry higher legal costs. Instead, they opt for the omission of good news to repurchase stocks at lower prices. The study results reconcile the conflicting evidence of Brockman et al. (2008) and Ge and Lennox (2011).

This study aims to introduce the Youth Jeonse Rental Housing Program using the unique characteristics of the Korean housing market to explain its theoretical value in the current theoretical landscape of public housing and to identify the effect of the program on the regional housing price.

This study uses three hedonic price models on the basis of Korea’s housing market, namely, own, jeonse and rent models. Moreover, it uses the hierarchical linear model to include both house- and region-level variables.

Analysis shows that youth rental housing has no effect on falling prices in the region unlike long-term rental housing. Thus, the policies using regional tenure system are more effective in the social mix than existing public housing policies.

This study introduces the program using Korea’s unique tenure system called jeonse, arguing its advantages for the supplier, recipients and regional neighborhoods. Suppliers can easily provide affordable housing at a low economic and administrative cost, whereas recipients can easily mix socially, have broad housing choices and a fighting chance for a stable life. Additionally, this policy has a low negative impact on the region. Furthermore, this study theoretically presents the potential for mixed paths other than demand or supply policies. It introduces and analyzes special policy objectives for youth housing problems.

This study investigates the influences of social media marketing activities (SMMAs) on brand preference by focussing on the mediation influence of brand recognisability and the moderator influence of brand signature in higher education institutions in Germany. A total of 257 students were surveyed and the data gathered were tested through partial least squares structural equation modelling. The findings demonstrated that higher-education institutions’ SMMAs had a significant effect on both brand recognisability and students’ brand preference. The findings also empirically proved the significant mediator influence of brand recognisability and the moderator influence of brand signature upon the association of higher education institutions’ SMMAs and students’ brand preference. It is anticipated that the findings of this research could be utilised as a significant solution in the improvement of higher education institutions’ SMMAs, specifically focussing on the significance of each component of SMMAs.

The purpose of this paper is to take advantage of Internet of Things (IoT) for intelligent route programming of crowd emergency evacuation in metro station. It is a novel approach to ensure the crowd safety and reduce the casualties in the emergency context. An evacuation route programming model is constructed to select a suitable evacuation route and support the emergency decision maker of metro station.

The IoT technology is employed to collect and screen information, and to construct an expert decision model to support the metro station manager to make decision. As a feasible way to solve the multiple criteria decision-making problem, an improved multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) approach is introduced.

The case study indicates that the model provides valuable suggestions for evacuation route programming and offers practical support for the design of an evacuation route guidance system. Moreover, IoT plays an important role in the process of intelligent route programming of crowd emergency evacuation in metro station. A library has similar structure and crowd characteristics of a metro station, thus the intelligent route programming approach can be applied to the library crowd evacuation.

The highlights of this paper are listed as followings: the accuracy and accessibility of the metro station’s real-time information are improved by integrating IoT technology with the intelligent route programming of crowd emergency evacuation. An improved MABAC approach is introduced to the expert support model. It promotes the applicability and reliability of decision making for emergency evacuation route selection in metro station. It is a novel way to combine the decision-making methods with practice.

This study examines what motivates firms to go and remain abroad despite uncertain profit potential. In a departure from probing traditional market-seeking, profit-driven motives, the authors explore how domestically driven, sociocultural motivations may shape the foreign market entry decisions of Korean commercial banks (KCBs). The authors argue that, due to the power imbalance between KCBs and their chaebol clients within the historical and cultural contexts of their relationships, KCBs' foreign market entries may depend more on their clients' presence in these markets than on their profit potential.

The authors focus on the foreign market entries of KCBs and their client firms. Using the data of 8 KCBs and their client firms belonging to the 60 business groups (chaebols) of Korea, the authors analyze 6,577 observations involving the dyadic relationship between a KCB and its client firm in 15 host countries from 2005 to 2014.

The authors find that the number of clients' subsidiaries operating in foreign markets may increase the likelihood of KCBs entering these markets. Moreover, when KCBs earn more domestic profit from client firms, the potential Korean market in the host country is greater, and the institutional distance between the host country and Korea is smaller.

In addition to the critical role of a bank-centered financing system in advancing a developing country and its firms, the authors’ findings suggest that firms should pay attention to the local diaspora and the institutional distance between the host and home countries in order to manage power-imbalanced relationships and make them sustainable.

The study contributes to the literature on foreign market entry by demonstrating how the home country's sociocultural factors may worsen the power imbalance, thereby pushing firms to make seemingly irrational decisions to go and stay abroad. That is, KCBs' foreign operations may be a way of seeking relational benefits with client firms, which would serve as a source of long-term domestic market profits. The authors’ findings thus highlight the need to consider how sociocultural factors may also shape firms' decision-making in their international business.

Given the acute competition between music-streaming platforms (MSPs), the purpose of this study is to identify the relational motivators of brand loyalty towards the MSP in terms of user-brand involvement, brand trust, brand engagement, brand recommendation and brand loyalty.

Cross-sectional quantitative data, gathered from a total of 340 eligible respondents via an online questionnaire survey, were empirically analysed and validated using a hybrid predictive-analytics structural equation modelling (SEM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) method.

The results of this study demonstrate that user-brand involvement promotes brand loyalty toward a MSP by fostering brand engagement, brand trust and positive word-of-mouth. SEM and ANN data comparison reveals good consistency.

The generalizability of the research outcomes may be constrained, as this study only considers the data from a single country (i.e. Malaysia) and one music streaming platform (i.e. Spotify). This study highlighted the relevance of user-brand involvement and non-core supporting services in the cultivation of brand loyalty, particularly their salient roles in promoting favourable attitudes and behaviours towards platform brands.

The insights produced can aid MSPs in devising better user retention strategies that can be used to maintain their competitive edge over time. The findings of this study made it abundantly evident that practitioners should facilitate more user-brand cooperative activities to encourage user-brand involvement and, ultimately, foster brand loyalty.

This study has addressed a major research gap by examining the relational roots of brand loyalty, which transcend the typical focus on transactional factors and technical lock-in. This study pioneered the investigation of brand involvement with user involvement.