Deputy Editor of MIS Quarterly Dr. Chee-Wee Tan Visited WHU

On May 24, Dr. Chee-Wee Tan, Associate Professor of IT Management Department of Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) and deputy editor of the top journal in the field of international information systems MIS Quarterly, was invited to our university, and made a lecture entitled "the Art of Online Foraging: Adaptive Search in Consumer-Generated Content Environments”.

Dr. Chee-Wee Tan introduced in a detailed manner how he and his research team conduct online foraging in Consumer-Generated Content Environments. Based on the information foraging theory and information search theory in the field of Traditional Library and Information Science, and relevant theories on behavioral control in social psychology, combined with four features of user online information search, his research team has generalized two specific strategies of user online information search: target-based search strategies and exploratory search strategy. Based on this, Dr. Chee-Wee Tan put forward two research questions: firstly, how can different search functions adapt to specific information search strategy; secondly, how different information search strategies affect the user's search behavior and results. To answer these questions, Dr Chee-Wee Tan and his team spent two years to build a online restaurant comment website somewhat similar to dianping.com (a famous Chinese online restaurant comment website), and the data of the site is written by crawlers, they are real data from America's most famous online review sites. They selected a number of subjects for test through this site, by giving subjects different target-based tasks and exploratory tasks, they try to understand online foraging behavior of consumers in self-generated content environment.