Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis of Social Roles for Collective Decision-Making Support

With the popularity of Social Network Service (SNS) and the increasing of users, individuals' social roles in a social network have become more and more important in recommendation of the personalized services, and in a collective decision-making process as well. In an SNS system, active users may not represent the major opinions among the whole users, and most of the users' opinions may be multifarious. In this study, we consider users' social roles as an important element to support the collective decision-making process. After introducing the social choice theories and collective decision-making model, we present a three-layer model to analyze users' social roles in a hierarchical way, and utilize it to support the collective decision-making process. A case study for COD (Course-Offering Determination) with an application scenario is demonstrated to show the process of how users' social roles are utilized to support the collective decision-making.