Social interactions in a community influence perceptions and values of members of the community. Recently Web 2.0 technologies have stimulated rapid growth of online communities, where communications between participants are made much easier. It is important to study how participants' behaviors...

This dissertation comprises of three independent essays which introduce novel psychologically inspired process models and examine their implications for individual, collective or market behavior. The first essay studies multi-attribute choice as a guided process of search. It puts forward a...