A social appraisal mechanism for online purchase decision support in the micro-blogosphere

•The collective opinions solicited from friends are largely beneficial for online purchase support.•We propose a social appraisal mechanism for supporting online users' decision in the micro-blogosphere.•The proposed framework is composed analysis of social companionship, collective opinion, and consensus decision.•The proposed mechanism can successfully summarize the collective opinions and expedite the decision-making process.

Owing to the plentiful participation of knowledgeable users, an online social network could be seen as a large group of experts that support the decisions of online users. Collective opinions solicited from friends are largely beneficial for online purchase support and can create significant opportunities for sales. In this paper, a social appraisal mechanism composed using the methodologies of social companionship analysis, collective opinion analysis, and consensus decision analysis is proposed for the online users of the micro-blogosphere. The proposed mechanism can successfully summarize collective opinions and expedite the decision-making process that characterizes users' purchasing behaviors.