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.