Analysis of Korea and Global Monopoly Research Trends Using Topic Modeling and Time-Series Analysis

Abstract

Many countries have made efforts to prevent the concentration of a few major corporations and monopolistic practices by developing and improving fair trade laws and antitrust regulations. However, the emergence of new industries and changes in trading patterns due to increased online transactions amid the COVID-19 pandemic have created gaps in existing laws. We aim to predict trends in monopolistic industries to proactively prevent such problems by establishing relevant laws or regulations. In order to examine the research trends on domestic and international monopolies, we collected abstracts of papers related to monopoly regulation from the RISS database for domestic papers and the Web of Science for international papers from 1995 to 2021. After preprocessing the data, LDA topic modeling was conducted to extract the top 15 significant topics. Moreover, we proposed a method for calculating the topic's importance to measure how actively research has progressed. We employed the linear regression model to examine the trends in research importance for each topic, and the ARIMA model was applied to predict the future trends in research importance for the next three years. While no significant trends were observed in the international data, the findings from the domestic data indicated a significant increasing volume of research on “online transactions” in the future.