E-business decision making by agreement

Gathering customer data over the Internet is largely limited to collecting the responses to a set of easily answerable questions, such as Yes/No questions and Likert scale questions. These data are then analyzed to identify customer trends or other items of interest to management. The data can be useful but key to their usage is the application of suitable mathematical tools. Traditionally little more than standard statistics has been used in the analysis of ordinal, or category, data. This can be inaccurate and in some cases, misleading. This paper introduces measures of agreement and dissent to the field of eBusiness analysis and shows how ordinal data can be analyzed in more meaningful ways.