Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intellectual ...

Aurilla Aurelie Bechina and Eli Hustad
The traditional search <strong>of</strong> information about product or a service is done ei<strong>the</strong>r through <strong>the</strong> vendors, ,
news papers, consumer organisations and so forth (Stefan Stieglitz & Anna-Maria Schneider, 2008).
Today thanks to <strong>the</strong> increasing growth <strong>of</strong> electronic commerce and social s<strong>of</strong>tware, <strong>the</strong> consumers
can search <strong>the</strong> needed information by interacting more closely ei<strong>the</strong>r with <strong>the</strong> vendors in an online
shopping environment or with o<strong>the</strong>rs consumers via special website (Häubl & Trifts, 2000).
Therefore, companies are investigating <strong>the</strong> needed features <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir electronic shopping environment
in order to assist consumers in <strong>the</strong>ir purchasing decisions. New social tools have brought a new
revolution on <strong>the</strong> way consumers search for product information and make purchase decisions.
However, one <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> issues encountered by <strong>the</strong> consumer is to find trustable information without being
too much influenced by <strong>the</strong> claim made by <strong>the</strong> vendor about <strong>the</strong> superiority <strong>of</strong> its product.
Thanks to <strong>the</strong> emergence <strong>of</strong> social network media tools such as facebook, twitter, wiki and so forth,
people have <strong>the</strong> opportunity to tap into <strong>the</strong> collective knowledge generated by users before and after
<strong>the</strong>ir product purchasing. Today, users can not only generate content (UGC) but as well provide
additional information such comments about a product or a service. Web2.0 technologies provide
several mechanisms allowing <strong>the</strong> ranking, vote or tagging <strong>of</strong> a social object.
The last couple <strong>of</strong> years, several research studies discussing <strong>the</strong> new trends based on <strong>the</strong> usage <strong>of</strong>
social media within business context have been published (Grossman & McCarthy, 2007; Harrison &
Thomas, 2009; Sau-ling, 2010). However <strong>the</strong>re is a still a need to fur<strong>the</strong>r understand whe<strong>the</strong>r <strong>the</strong> use
<strong>of</strong> social media and collective intelligence could contribute to <strong>the</strong> purchasing decision making.
Bonabeau discusses how <strong>the</strong> use <strong>of</strong> collective Intelligence can help to make better decisions (Eric
Bonabeau, 2009). He suggests that decision making can be broken in two tasks: The generation <strong>of</strong>
potential solutions and <strong>the</strong> evaluation <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>m. Each <strong>of</strong> those tasks can be negatively influenced by
human biases such for instance availability bias (satisfied with an easy solution). In order to mitigate
<strong>the</strong> bias, <strong>the</strong> three collective intelligence approaches such as outreach, additive aggregation and selforganization
can be used.
Outreach is understood as <strong>the</strong> process <strong>of</strong> collecting ideas across different platforms. Its value resides
in <strong>the</strong> broadening <strong>the</strong> number <strong>of</strong> sources (individuals) who are generating contents about a product or
providing evaluations. The underlying approach is that <strong>the</strong>re are people that could generate useful
information for <strong>the</strong> consumers.
Additive aggregation is understood as <strong>the</strong> process <strong>of</strong> collecting information from multiple sources and
<strong>the</strong>n performing some kind <strong>of</strong> average as stated by Bonabeau. In reality, <strong>the</strong> aggregation is much
more complex if we would consider <strong>the</strong> nature <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> evaluation that can be qualitative or quantitative.
Therefore quite <strong>of</strong>ten while analyzing <strong>the</strong> various options, <strong>the</strong>re as some o<strong>the</strong>rs elements that enter
into account such as reliability, likelihood, trustable <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> sources.
Self organization processes allowing people to interact with each o<strong>the</strong>rs and contributing to add
overall value to <strong>the</strong> group such for instance Wikipedia and collaborative workspaces. These
applications allow people to generate or delete content generated by o<strong>the</strong>rs members.
The following part introduces <strong>the</strong> Web2.0 concepts and technologies
1.2 Web2.0 concepts
Web 2.0 and its related elements were introduced through a brainstorming session at a conference
launched by <strong>the</strong> computer book publisher O’Reilly and <strong>the</strong> event organizer MediaLive <strong>International</strong> in
2004 (O'Reilly, 2005).
The Web 2.0 phenomenon has gained tremendous visibility and has attracted strong interests not
only from <strong>the</strong> scientific community but as well from businesses and IT vendors (Smith, 2008). This has
generated some conflicting definitions <strong>of</strong> Web 2.0 since IT vendors are trying to capitalize on this
trend by associating <strong>the</strong>ir products with Web 2.0 attributes, like <strong>the</strong>y did with KM technologies in <strong>the</strong>
mid 90’s. Web2.0 is a controversial term, and <strong>the</strong>re exists different definitions. To elaborate <strong>the</strong>
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