This paper examines how gamification affects user intention to use mobile healthcare applications (mHealth) and how the effect of gamification works differently according to health status, age, and gender. We use data from a mobile survey conducted by a Korean representative survey agency. We estimate the effect of gamification on user intention to use mobile healthcare applications based on a structural equation model and examine the moderating effects of self-reported health status, age, and gender. We find that gamification is effective in increasing user intention to use mHealth, especially in the healthy and younger groups. These findings suggest that mHealth, with the gamification factor, would encourage healthy (but lack exercise) people as well as unhealthy people to maintain their health status, and thus the mHealth developers need to consider the gamification factor when they develop mHealth services for healthy people.

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Abstract:We study how the information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem affects the sustainable growth of ICT firms. For our study, we analyze the efficiencies of ICT firms in China, South Korea, the United States, and Japan, which are the current leaders in the global ICT industry, each with different ICT ecosystem structures. We use metafrontier analysis (MFA) to compare the efficiencies among countries with different structures, and then use Tobit regression to identify the causes of the efficiency gaps. Our results reveal that the US has the highest efficiency, followed by Japan, South Korea, and China, in that order, and the countries with more balanced ICT ecosystems across sub-industries-manufacturing, software and IT services, content, and telecommunications-have more efficient ICT industries. This suggests that a more balanced industrial development is important to enhancing the overall competitiveness of the ICT industry.

The objective of this study is developing a classification scheme of the creative employment and analyzing trends of the creative employment in Korea. Many countries have pursued the creative economy to generate new jobs and tried to estimate the creative employment as a way to measure the creative economy. However, the definition of the creative employment is still ambiguous partly because it depends on the characteristics of diverse industries and the direction of economic policies that each country has. Therefore, we propose a classification scheme of the creative employment, which reflects the creative economy in Korea. Then, we examine how the creative employment changes in Korea. Our results show that the jobs requiring the highest level of creative skills increase stably and steadily over the years.

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