Online Decision-Making

This chapter explores online decision-making, suggesting that as the Internet continues to enlarge its influence in people’s lives, an increasing number of decisions will be taken online. With this in mind it is important to understand the components that go into online decision-making. The chapter examines and summarizes selective research on decision-making from the perspective of the social net in three major sections. The first lays the foundation by discussing classical perspectives on decision-making. This allows for a more informed discussion in the second section, which focuses on decision-making through an electronic medium. This reviews seminal studies comparing face-to-face and computer-mediated groups on decision-making tasks, presents the latest research on how people make judgments of others based on profile information, and connects decision-making on the social net to the classical research on decision-making. The third section reviews research on virtual teams—an organizational unit that is of immense importance in the digital workplace. The chapter concludes by setting out recommendations for future research