2014, Vol.21, No.4

Informatization Policy 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 4.08

pISSN : 1598-3498
https://journal.kci.go.kr/nia

Crowd-funding platforms, which enable to collect funds from individuals, have recently gainedgrowing interests around the world. This study intends to provide future research directions for thecrowd-funding by reviewing past research works. For this purpose, two research themes are selected - (1)motivations to participate in crowd-funding and (2) critical success factors for the project funding. Themotivations are analyzed from both perspectives of fund demanders and suppliers. The critical success factors areinvestigated by using four dimensions: fund demanders, fund suppliers, relationships between demanders andsuppliers, and project characteristics. Using the implications found from the past research, this paper offersfuture research issues necessary for the growth of crowd-funding platforms.

The age of big data has not only opened new opportunities for economic growth in variousindustries, but it has also created new problems related to personal information protection andprivacy invasion. Given this situation, Korea’s communications commission has proposed a big data guidelinethat specifies how companies should collect and utilize personal information in the big data environment. However, this guideline is more focused on industrial development than personal information protection, and itcontains many features that conflict with personal information protection law as it currently exists. As a result,civic groups strongly oppose the guideline, as it may create serious privacy issues for subjects of informationgathering. Thus, this paper analyses the limitations of the guideline by comparing it with domestic and foreignlaws about personal information protection and privacy. We also discuss the direction of legalization andinstitutionalization with respect to the secure use of big data.

This study investigated how online information affected consumers’purchases at socialcommerce websites. In the online purchase process, consumers use two types of online information:user generated content(UGC) and vendor generated content(VGC). These information types may influenceconsumers’purchase intention differently because each information builds entity trust and content trust, whichplay mediation roles between online information and purchase intention. According to the analysis results,general transactional information and safe transaction information of VGC and reputation information of UGCsignificantly affected entity trust. But content trust was affected only from general transactional information ofVGC. And entity trust significantly affected content trust as well as purchase intention. These findings imply thatsocial commerce vendors should focus mainly on entity trust for enhancing consumers’purchase intention. Toachieve this objective, in the short term perspective, they should endeavor how to enhance general transactioninformation and safe transaction information qualities because these information types are easily controlled andimproved by vendors. In the long term perspective, they should focus on reputation formation because reputationtakes long time.