Individual and Organizational Antecedents of Professional Ethics of Public Relations Practitioners in Korea

This study examines the effects of individual ethical values and organizational factors on the professional ethics of PR practitioners in Korea by considering a person–situation interactionist model. Individual ethical values are used as individual factors, and organizational factors consist of an organization’s reward and punishment for ethical/unethical behavior, the behavior of peers, and the ethical integrity of the chief ethics officer. The professional ethics of PR practitioners (the dependent variable) are classified into the following three dimensions: professional ethics for the public, the client, and the PR industry. The results indicate that agency practitioners were more likely to be committed to their profession than to their organization, whereas in-house practitioners were more likely to be committed to their organization than to their profession. That is, in-house practitioners showed weak professional commitment, indicating that they perceived themselves as employees, not as PR professionals. Organizational factors such as reward, punishment, and peers’ ethical behavior had considerable influence on the professional ethics of in-house practitioners, whereas they had little influence on agency practitioners. Organizational factors as well as individual ethical values were more likely to influence the professional ethics of in-house practitioners than that of agency practitioners. Thus, to foster in-house practitioners’ professional ethics and commitment, professional associations in the PR industry should make efforts to provide in-house practitioners with more information on the PR industry and more opportunities for interacting and maintaining communication with their colleagues in the industry.     

Sustainability in the Stochastic Ramsey Model

Journal of Quantitative Economics - In this paper we provide a self-contained exposition of the problem of sustaining a constant consumption level in a Ramsey model. Our focus is on the case in...     

A stochastic patent citation analysis approach to assessing future technological impacts

The anticipation and forecast of technological changes are of vital importance, as technological advances become increasingly fast and complex. What is at the core is identification of the current technologies that will drive technological changes over the coming few years. In this respect, numerous approaches have been devised to assess future technological impacts based on patent citation information, but do not provide a fair reflection of dynamic and idiosyncratic aspects of technological impacts as they are deterministic methods based on simple citation counts. We propose a stochastic patent citation analysis that can assess future technological impacts in a time period of interest by employing the future citation count as a proxy. At the heart of the proposed approach is a Pareto/NBD (Negative Binomial Distribution) model for taking into account the dynamic and idiosyncratic aspects of technological impacts. A patent citation matrix is first constructed for each time unit with citation patterns of the past. The future technological impacts are then derived by Pareto/NBD sub-model and gamma–gamma sub-model. A case study of the display technology patents is presented to illustrate the proposed approach. We believe our method can be employed in various research fields, from narrow patent valuation, to broad technological analysis and planning.     

Demand forecasting for new media services with consideration of competitive relationships using the competitive Bass model and the theory of the niche

New broadcasting services such as Internet protocol TV (IPTV) have been totally revolutionizing the broadcasting industry; thus, the prediction of the degree of diffusion of new media services is a major topic of interest for both governments and providers. This paper proposes a new approach towards demand forecasting for new services with no data and with consideration of competitive relationships with existing services. The underlying model of the proposed approach is the competitive Bass model, which is the most widely used competitive diffusion model. The competition coefficients of the model are estimated by introducing the theory of the niche. The theory of the niche, which originates from ecology, has often been used as a framework for examining competition patterns in the media industry. This study develops a new integrated measure, competitive superiority, by modifying and combining the two conventional measures of the theory of the niche, viz., niche overlap and niche superiority. The competition coefficients are then obtained by adjusting the values of competitive superiority to be incorporated in the model based on the relationship between competition and imitation effects. A case of Korean digital broadcasting services is presented to illustrate the proposed approach.     

Using patent information for designing new product and technology: keyword based technology roadmapping

With the rapid change in markets and technologies, it is becoming essential for firms to develop new products constantly. This can most successfully be achieved by using technology roadmaps (TRMs), which are effective tools for connecting product and technology planning. However, TRMs generally tend to overstate the qualitative and expert-dependent knowledge rather than incorporating quantitative and objective information. This paper proposes a new approach where patent data are used in a quantitative methodology to support reliable decision-making in roadmapping processes. In this study, text-mining techniques were utilized to extract the relevant information on which portfolio, co-word, and network analyses were carried out. The results were three types of product-technology maps that can be applied to specific roadmapping steps. The suggested approach is expected to yield useful information about roadmapping, and help improve the overall effectiveness and quality of the technique.