Design and implementation of sustainable social shopping systems

Abstract

Sustainability is one of the most often discussed topics in our society. Although no one argues that individuals are the main players in changing society and the environment, individuals have always been treated as just actors and decision makers who transform the organizational, societal, national, and/or global sustainability practices. However, our fundamental belief is that individual and personal sustainability are at the heart of organizational and societal sustainability. One of the key activities that humans undertake that has an overwhelming influence on the economic, environmental, and health facets of their life is shopping. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using the concepts and principles of decision-making, habit formation, social networks, and benchmarking to influence consumer behavior towards sustainable shopping. We propose a framework and architecture for Sustainable Social Shopping Systems. We are in the process of prototyping and implementing them in the context of a purely online supermarket.