The social embeddedness of decision making: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Sociologists have long recognized that economic decisions are socially embedded. Management sciences and business practices have gradually begun to incorporate this idea. With the rise of the Internet, large-scale data are available on friendships, recommendations, transactions and social interactions, which have led to a strong momentum for research in this area. The aim of this article is to inspire multidisciplinary research on the mechanisms and consequences of social embeddedness on decision making and to highlight opportunities and challenges by synthesizing findings from various fields, such as IS research, sociology, economics, marketing and other management disciplines. Key suggestions of this paper are to identify the causality between social embeddedness and decision making with small-scale experiments, and to learn more about network formation by analyzing the evolution of social networks.

Consequences of customer engagement behavior: when negative Facebook posts have positive effects

“…In times of omnipresent mass media, it is less a problem of getting access to sufficient information but rather an issue of Consequences of customer engagement behavior on Facebookfiltering out untrustworthy data from an overwhelming mass of facts and figures (Takac et al 2011). Consumers need cues to evaluate the relevance and trustworthiness of product-and brand-related information on social networking sites (Pan and Chiou 2011).…”

“…Nonetheless, there is a paucity of scholarly research related to a coherent understanding of how social connections in OSNs impact decision making (Takac et al 2011). In other words, little is known about Bthe relationship between customer behavioral engagement and other proximal constructs^ (Gummerus et al 2012, p. 858); for example, to what extent the formation of consumer attitudes is driven by specific consumer Bengagement^cognitions, emotions and behaviors, or what effects on consumer purchase intentions can be expected (Hollebeek and Chen 2014).…”

Social commerce—state-of-the-art and future research directions

“…Social commerce research is also concerned with research on social processes (12 %) (e.g., Adjei et al 2010;Amblee and Bui 2011;Chen et al 2009;Forman et al 2008;Garg et al 2011;Gruner et al 2014;Pentina et al 2008;Shen et al 2010;Takac et al 2011;Trusov et al 2013;Wei et al 2011;Xu et al 2008;Zheng et al 2011). Fifty-seven percent of the analyzed articles investigate social networking sites, 29 % are related to social shopping websites, and only one article focuses on group buying websites and another one on presentation sites.…”

Getting a job via career-oriented social networking markets

“…Vice versa, the social network big blues (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. ) are increasingly embedding electronic markets business functions in their applications, e.g., career markets (Przemyslaw et al 2013;Takac et al 2011). Consequently, more and more companies such as IBM or Microsoft make use of social network applications in order to search for and recruit new employees (Doherty 2010;Madia 2011;Zhou et al 2012).…”