Effects of Country-of-Manufacture and Brand Image on Korean Consumers' Purchase Intention

ABSTRACT

In this study, a theoretical framework is developed to explain the differential effects of country-of-manufacture (COM) and brand image on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of Koreans' consumer decision making. Although effects are product specific, findings, overall, indicate that brand image has a stronger effect than COM on Koreans' perceptions of hybrid global products. Moving the production of an electronic product (TV) to a developing country, however, negatively affected Koreans' evaluation of product performance, prestige (brand and technical), and purchase attitudes. The findings have interesting marketing implications for hybrid global brands and contribute to building a theory of COM.     

‘Irrational exuberance’ in the long-run UK stock market

Using the macroeconomic data for 1830–2004 in vector error correction models, we find that the UK stock price was largely in line with the equilibrium level. However, the UK stock price shows large and slow-moving positive or negative deviations from the equilibrium, forming cycles of at least a few decades in length. We also show that the equity premium is as low as 3.1% for the 175 years, which is far smaller than the 6 to 7% that has been suggested by many previous studies. Finally, contrary to general belief, the 1999 UK stock price did not appear to be overvalued in our study. We suggest that the 25 years of sharp increase in the UK stock price prior to 1999 can be understood as a mere mean-reversion towards the long-run equilibrium level.     

A NICE agenda for IMP research

The IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purchasing) Group has engaged in a number of interesting developments in the past few years. Particularly adventurous have been the agendas of ‘pictures’ and sense-making and of time. In this paper we argue that borrowing and combining contemporary foci within social science on narratives, identity, culture and epoché temporality (for which we use the acronym N.I.C.E) allows the construction of an approach that can integrate these IMP agendas into a new research direction for the group that will keep it at the leading edge of marketing research. The purpose of our paper is to introduce and integrate discursive and temporal elements into the understanding and research of business networks to develop a more dynamic and hermeneutic approach. Our purpose is to provide a contribution to the field in exploring how identities are formed within business networks through narrative episodes in interconnecting relationships over time. We bring together all of the elements of a NICE agenda in an attempt to provide an integrative, ‘multi-lens’ theory of business networks focussed within the IMP research tradition. In doing so, we construct meaning as itself networked; sense-making involves relating presently narrated episodes to symbolic and material aspects of other narrative network episodes and events through emplotment and storying.     

Competitive Effects of Disclosure in a Strategic Entry Model

We investigate the welfare consequences of incumbent firms' mutual disclosure of cost information when there is a threat of entry from a firm not required to disclose its private cost information. New effects of disclosure are observed relative to no-entry models, with the result that incumbents' expected output is a decreasing function of the disclosure level. However, further analysis shows that increased disclosure usually increases incumbent expected profits and decreases expected consumer surplus, despite the additional entry effect of disclosure. Such analytical derivations provide objective input to the FASB as they attempt to predict the competitive effects of changing mandated disclosure requirements.     

Market overreaction and investment strategies

We investigated the overreaction of the Korean market in response to shocks in the US stock market, and analysed the dynamic relationship between these two markets since 1996. We found that the KOSPI 200 index futures overreacted to the S&P 500 index returns during the period from 2000 to 2009 when the Korean market was in its growth stage. As the Korean market matured and the KOSPI 200 overnight futures were introduced in 2009, the overreaction disappeared. When investors employed the Kelly model or Value-at-Risk to exploit the overreaction, their trading strategies produced significant profits during the growth stage even after considering transaction costs and risk, but the profits attenuated once the overnight futures market was launched in 2009.     

Long-run determinant of Korean economic growth: empirical evidence from manufacturing

This paper challenges the recent contrarian view that the phenomenal growth of East Asian NICs is fuelled mainly by the accumulation of production inputs not by TFP growth. To appraise this view, we investigated and re-evaluated South Korean manufacturing growth (1973(Q1)–1993(Q4)). Using Johansen's cointegrating analysis, our results show that South Korean manufacturing appears to have increasing returns to scale in production technology. The ‘learning by doing’ effect defined by Lucas (1988) is empirically supported. This effect appears to be observed as a long-run determinant of South Korean manufacturing growth. Consequently, South Korean manufacturing growth can be described by an endogenous economic growth model, such as the Lucas (1988) model, contradicting the contrarian view.     

How to manage the intensity of comparison in comparative advertising over time

Despite the popularity of comparative advertising (CA) over the past three decades, few studies have explored how to develop this strategy outside the USA. This study reports the results of experiments conducted in South Korea, a country where CA has rarely been used. Two hundred Korean college students were exposed to fictitious advertisements in which the independent variable of comparison intensity (non-comparative/low/medium/high/increasing) and exposure sequence (first/second/third) were manipulated. The dependent variables of attitude towards the brand and purchase interest assessed advertising effectiveness. Results suggest that the effectiveness of comparative advertising in Korea is improved by increasing the intensity of comparison gradually from indirect (low) to direct (high) over time.     

Structural effects of cognitive and affective reponses to web advertisements,website and brand attitudes,and purchase intentions: The case of casual-dining restaurants

This study investigates the structural relationships among responses to website advertisements, website attitudes, brand attitudes, and purchase intentions in the case of web advertisements for casual-dining restaurants. Responses toward advertising (Rad) factors were categorized as cognitive responses and affective responses. The SEM model in LISREL was used to examine the interrelationships among the proposed hypothesized constructs. Several empirical results were obtained. First, Rad had a positive effect on website attitudes. Second, website attitudes had a positive effect on brand attitudes. Third, brand attitudes had a positive effect on purchase intentions. Finally, some discussion and implications of the study are provided.     

Factors affecting successful innovation by content-layer firms in Korea

Technological convergence is changing the division of industries from vertical to horizontal; it has also made user participation easier in information and communication technology industries. To understand this situation, it is necessary to identify the causes of successful innovation. In this research, factors affecting successful innovation by mobile and Internet contents firms were tested from the viewpoint of user-involved innovation. The results show that active user participation in the innovation development process is very important. In addition to being useful to firms, this study points out the need for policies that support users to policy makers.     

Die Außenwirtschaft der UdSSR in der zeit von perestrojka

The study of divided government is one of important fields in public choice theory. American voters split their ballots as if intent on preserving divided party control. The U.S. House of Representatives has consistently been Democratic for much of the twentieth century. As indicated by Sprague, it is theoretically true that a number of significant consequences for partisan control of a legislature are entailed by the unequal distribution of seat safety under conditions of high levels of institutionalization. The problem is how to measure the institutionalization of partisan seat safety in a time‐series. The model proposed by Sprague is somewhat awkward and complicated in measuring it. This paper provides a more plausible model and tests empirical data.