Empirical Study of Social Features' Roles in Buyers' Complex Decision Making

摘要

This paper aims at studying the roles of social features (as obtained from social networking sources) in buyers' decision process when they are searching for products to buy. Through close observation of users' objective behavior, we have discovered the importance of different types of social features in supporting users to achieve a confident decision at the end. Improving suggestions are further derived on how to better present the social information and combine them with static product attributes to enhance current online decision supports.