Collective Choice in Virtual Teams

Virtual organizations within and across enterprise structures are becoming mature as a potentially effective means for goal oriented business teamwork. Among the plentiful of support functions enabling the efficient cooperation in teams, team decision making is a very crucial one, but does not find adequate support in contemporary team software solutions. Even the most knowledgeable results from collective choice theory are not reflected in the respective virtual team environments.This paper makes a first and very systematic attempt to provide virtual teams with the power of voting procedures developed in the context of the theory of collective choice. A toolset, TEAMVOTE, for electronic decision making is presented, implementing a blend of the most important collective choice strategies like the Dodgson rule, the majority rule, plurality voting, Borda counting, approval voting, the Nanson rule, the Hare rule, the Coomb rule etc. based on standard Internet technology. The services of TEAMVOTE targeted to support goal oriented business teams in group decision matters raises the perspective of its use also to enable democratic processes on a societal scale.