Information technology support for collaborative decision making in auditing: An experimental investigation

Several studies in behavioral decision making have found that decisions made by interacting groups tend to "shift" from the mean judgment for the same task when performed individually. While this "choice-shift" phenomenon has been documented in experiments where group participants interact face-to-face, the impact of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) on this phenomenon has not been investigated. GDSS permit simultaneous and anonymous interaction and provide a structured environment for group discussion. This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating whether decisions reached by groups using GDSS technology differ from those made by traditional "face-to-face" groups for the same judgment task. The results revealed that GDSS-mediated communication, whether anonymous or non-anonymous, resulted in no significant choice shift while the face-to-face communication mode resulted in a significant cautious shift. The results also revealed that GDSS-mediated communication was more efficient, and that there was no significant difference in subjects' perceived satisfaction with the group process between GDSS-mediated and face-to-face groups.