【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 er, our understanding of social influence in Emerce could be a starting point to develop strategies and methodologies for a social interaction based Emerce decision making system. We begin by identifying the impact of social influence in various aspects of Emerce in Section 2 and then describe how to exercise social influence on a customer’s decision making process with an example in Section 3. We provide a summary of technology for social work analysis in Section 4 and discuss research challenges in Section 5. We conclude the paper in Section 6. 2. WHAT IS SOCIAL INFLUENCE? A social work is a graph of relationships and interactions within a group of individuals, which often plays a fundamental role as a medium for the spread of information, ideas, andinfluence among its members. A Webbased social work provides various methods such as a chat room and a discussion forum for participants who can interact, exchange opinions, and pare experiences with others. In the context of Emerce,social works emerge since many websites help a consumer’s final purchase decision by sharing reviews written by previous customers and evaluated by potential customers1. Many online shoppers tend to wait for early adopters’ opinions before making a purchase decision to reduce the risk of buying a new product. Bearden et the existence of two kinds of social influence in the adoption of a new product: normative social influence (or subjective norms) and informational social influence. Normative social influence creates social pressure for people to adopt a product or a service because people not adopting a product may be treated as “old fashioned” regardless of the individual’s preference toward the product. Informational social influence is a learning process through which people observe the experience of early adopters in their social work and decide whether to buy the new product. Thus, informational social influence can have a moderating role between customers’ attitudes toward a product and their intention to buy it, by enhancing consumers’ confidence in their preferences and beliefs toward the product . An approach to measuring the social influence between consumers of an Emerce website provides multiple , online shoppers are provided a number of high quality and personalized reviews of a product from trusted sources to convince them to buy. Second, a pany producing a product may get customers’ direct and detailed responses and be in a better position to predict market trends. Third, an Emerce website can identify opinion leaders with high influence and maximize the effectiveness of marketing based on a social work surrounding opinion leaders. In recent work,work based marketing and viral marketing has proven to be more costeffective than traditional direct marketing, which treats the customer as an independent decision maker and ignores the effect of the surrounding work. The premise of viral marketing is that targeting a few influential consumers initially can trigger a cascade of influence through a social work in which friends will voluntarily share their experiences or remend the product to other friends . Thus, a panycan avoid marketing directly to a consumer who is largely influenced by friends, and is not very likely to buy a product unless remended by friends. Therefore, constructing a social work using interactions between consumers and finding the important nodes, .,influential customers in the constructed social work has been a key issue for marketers as well as sociologists for some time. Many kinds of centrality measures have been develope