Reasoning with Conditional Preferences

Before an autonomous agent can perform automated negotiation on behalf of a user in an electronic commerce transaction, the user’s preferences over the set of outcomes must be learned as accurately as possible. This paper presents a structure, a Conditional Outcome Preference Network (COP-network), for modeling preferences directly elicited from a user. The COP-network then expands to indicate all preferences that can be inferred as a result. The network can be easily checked for consistency and redundancy, and can be used to determine quickly whether one outcome is preferred over another. An important feature of the COPnetwork is that conditional preferences, where a user’s preference over outcomes depends on whether particular attribute values are included, can be modeled and inferred as well. If the agent also knows the user’s utilities for some of the possible outcomes, then these can be considered in the COP-network as well. Three techniques for estimating utilities based on the specified preferences and utilities are described. One such technique, which works by first estimating utilities for long chains of outcomes for which preferences are known, is shown to be the most effective.