The social embeddedness of decision making: opportunities and challenges

Sociologists have long recognized that economic decisions are socially embedded. Management sciences and business practices have gradually begun to incorporate this idea. With the rise of the Internet, large-scale data are available on friendships, recommendations, transactions and social interactions, which have led to a strong momentum for research in this area. The aim of this article is to inspire multidisciplinary research on the mechanisms and consequences of social embeddedness on decision making and to highlight opportunities and challenges by synthesizing findings from various fields, such as IS research, sociology, economics, marketing and other management disciplines. Key suggestions of this paper are to identify the causality between social embeddedness and decision making with small-scale experiments, and to learn more about network formation by analyzing the evolution of social networks.