The Threats of North Korea’s Missile and Visitors’ International Conference Choice Behavior

The popularity of hosting international conferences has increased, as their positive economic and social effects are now widely recognized. The Korean government selected the international conference industry as one of the new industry engines in propelling the economy. This study examines the factors of participation in international conferences from the value perspective. To this end, a value-based adoption model (VAM) is employed to test our research model using empirical data. A total of 192 questionnaires which were acquired from International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2017 in Seoul were coded for analysis. The research findings reveal that technical support, program usefulness, and perceived threats are predictors of perceived value with significant positive influence and, moreover, the perceived threats are affected by media exposure of North Korea missile threats. Perceived value is found to exert significant effects on revisit intention. The major contribution of the paper is to discuss both the practical and theoretical implications, providing information to destination marketers, and employing VAM in international conferences research.