Thesis Proposal An Information Processing Model in Dynamic Decision Environments

Nowadays with the increasing prosperity of the World Wide Web (WWW), consumer e-commerce systems are in rapid development and are becoming an important part of our daily lives. Unlike traditional commerce, where the activities are carried out directly between human individuals or organizations, in e-commerce environments, the buyer (or the decision maker) interacts with the pre-designed computer systems to get information about products or services he/she wants. Normally the product or service information provided by the e-commerce system is far beyond any individual’s cognitive effort to process if no product search or decision aid tool is provided. For example, in amazon.com, there are millions of items to sell at the same time, it is little chance for the buyer to navigate all the items by hand to find a specific book that he/she wants to buy. Even when such product search tools are applied, without a high precision of the buyer’s preference model, search results are often inaccurate,