Influencing Factors on Knowledge Adoption of Mobile Game Developers in Online Communities

Recently, with the advance of wireless Internet access via mobile devices, a myriad of game development companies has forayed into the mobile game market, leading to intense competition. To survive in this fierce competition, mobile game developers often try to get a grasp of the rapidly changing needs of their customers by operating their own official communities where game users freely leave their requests, suggestions, and ideas relevant to focal games. Based on the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) and data quality (DQ) framework, this study derives key content, non-content, and hybrid cues that can be utilized when game developers accept suggested postings in these online communities. The results of the hierarchical multiple regression analysis show relevancy, timeliness, amount of writing, and the number of comments are positively associated with mobile game developers’ knowledge adoption. In addition, title attractiveness mitigates the relationship between amount of writing/the number of comments and knowledge adoption

Analyzing Spatial Variance of Airbnb Pricing Determinants Using Multiscale GWR Approach

A sharing economy accommodation service like Airbnb, which provides trust between strangers to connect them for profiting from underutilized assets, was born and has thrived thanks to the innovations in the platform technology. Due to the unique structure of Airbnb, the pricing strategies of hosts are very different from the conventional hospitality industry. However, existing Airbnb pricing studies have limitations considering the varying scale of operation among hosts, spatial variances in pricing strategies, and crucial geographic information for estimating the influence of the pricing variables, as well as ignoring inter-city variances. In this research, we explored the spatially heterogeneous relationship between price and pricing variables using an innovative spatial approach, Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR). Analysis results for Airbnb listing in Log Angeles and New York in the US showed the effectiveness of MGWR regarding estimating the influence of pricing variables spatially. By revealing spatially heterogeneous and dependent relationships, this research fills gaps in Airbnb pricing research and deepens the understanding of the pricing strategies of the hosts

Evaluating the Social Cost of Conflict between New Media and Society: The Case of Gaming Disorder in South Korea

Historically, the introduction of a new media in mass market caused a strong conflict starting from the nineteenth century popular literature, comics, rock music and film. Interestingly, these conflicts have shown similar and repeated patterns, which is now called media panic and moral regulation, and games are following this pattern. In 2019, Gaming disorder (GD) was decided to be included in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), and similar conflicts on games arenow expected. However, the social cost and damage have not been fully addressed until now. Thus, this study focuses on the estimation of the social cost induced by GD for policy design and decisions in the public healthcare of South Korea. Using the contingent valuation method, a popular valuation method in econometrics for non-market goods, this study has tried to estimate the social cost induced by the introduction of GD into the public healthcare practice. Focusing on a false positive problem in the diagnosis, this study estimates that the willingness to pay for GD diagnosis for children is about KRW 152 K (USD 135). Considering the difference between the prevalence of GD (1.9%) and GD suspicion rate of children in the respondents (12.54%), the excessive medical diagnosis cost due to the false positive problem is estimated to KRW 101 billion (USD 89.6 M), which is about four times more than the annual medical cost for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) treatment in South Korea. Thus, strong scientific proof and a cautious policy approach on GD are needed before the inclusion of GD in the public health practice

Factors Affecting the Adoption of Gamified Smart Tourism Applications: An Integrative Approach

Considering that the core concerns in sustainability are threats to the survival of humankind and the ecosystems that humans depend on, changing the consumption and production behaviors of individuals and society is inevitable. However, people are reluctant to change their own behavior in support of sustainability goals. This tendency seems to be especially strong in tourism because the main value of tourism is hedonic utility. Thus, the tourism industry is now introducing gamification and smart tourism to shift tourist behavior toward sustainability, but most of studies and practices only focus on the performance and application of gamification without considering customer adoption patterns and perceptions during the process. This study empirically investigated what factors affect the adoption of smart tourism applications that incorporate game elements, using the Google Maps tourist guide program. As an initial approach, we incorporated diverse theoretical approaches: perceived usefulness; perceived ease of use; perceived enjoyment from technology acceptance model; information and interaction motivations from the uses and gratifications theory; the network effect; distributive justice; flow as responses to the game characteristics of smart tourism applications; and information privacy concerns as a negative factor for diffusion. The result showed that hedonic characteristics of the gamified smart tourism application (GSTA) are strong in adoption. Perceived enjoyment had a significant influence on the intention to use, but information quality, related to cognitive experience, did not. The flow and perceived distributive justice associated with the game content were not significant, but the interaction motivation was significant in the research model. The results of this study show that individuals regard a GSTA as a low-level game tool. Also, it is important to preoccupy the smart tourism application market in terms of marketing strategy because the network effect is relevant to both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment. We also found that the need to provide personal information would negatively affect the adoption of a gamified smart tourism application

A Hybrid Defense Technique for ISP Against the Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

As malicious traffic from botnets now threatens the network infrastructure of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), the importance of controlling botnets is greater than ever before. However, it is not easy to handle rapidly evolving botnets efficiently because of the highly evolved detection avoidance techniques used by botnet makers. Further, nowadays, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can compromise not only specific target sites but also the entire network infrastructure, as high-bandwidth Internet services are now being provided. Thus, ISPs are deploying their own defense systems to prevent DDoS attacks and protect their network infrastructure. However, the new problem ISPs confront is that botnet masters also try to destroy their defense systems to make their attack successful. ISPs can mitigate DDoS through botnet-specific management by taking preemptive measures, such as the proactive reverse engineering of suspicious code and the use of honeypots. This paper illustrates an advanced DDoS defense technique for the use of ISPs with a real case study of the technique’s implementation. This technique was proven very effective method for controlling botnets, and we could confirm this effectiveness in a real ISP environment