A decision policy chooses an outcome dependent on given input parameters. Policies can adequately be represented by production rules, which are at the heart of modern business rule management systems. Classic ways of policy design are rule authoring by experts or learning from data. In this paper, we show that policies can also be derived from a model consisting of constraints and preferences. ...

The transportation sector offers substantial potential for greenhouse gas (GHG) emission abatement, but widely divergent cost estimates complicate policy making; energy–economy policy modelers apply top-down and bottom-up cost definitions and different assumptions about future technologies and the preferences of firms and households. Our hybrid energy–economy policy model is technology-rich, li...

Are there systematic political economy factors that shape preferences for foreign aid, a key component of American foreign policy? We analyze votes in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 2003 that would increase or decrease foreign aid by considering the political, economic, and ideological characteristics of legislators and their districts. To understand who supports and opposes foreign ...

Globalization affords greater opportunities to learn about foreign peoples than in the past. What impacts do interpersonal contact, media exposure to and knowledge about China have on the American people’s China policy preferences? Two large surveys of U.S. citizens were conducted in the summers of 2008 and 2009 to explore whether knowledge about China and prejudice against the Chinese people a...

Understanding the preferences of patients and health professionals is useful for health policy and planning. Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) are a quantitative technique for eliciting preferences that can be used in the absence of revealed preference data. The method involves asking individuals to state their preference over hypothetical alternative scenarios, goods or services. Each alterna...

This paper investigates the problem of policy search based on the only expert’s preferences. Whereas reinforcement learning classically relies on a reward function, or exploits the expert’s demonstrations, preference-based policy learning (PPL) iteratively builds and optimizes a policy return estimate as follows: The learning agent demonstrates a few policies, is informed of the expert’s prefer...

We examine the effects of various political campaign activities on voter preferences in the domain of US Presidential elections. We construct a comprehensive data set that covers the three most recent elections, with detailed records of voter preferences at the state-week level over an election period. We include various types of the most frequently utilized marketing instruments: two forms of ...

In many interactive decision making scenarios there is often no solution that satisfies all of the user’s preferences. The decision process can be helped by providing explanations. Relaxations show sets of consistent preferences and, thus, indicate which preferences can be enforced, while exclusion sets show which preferences can be relaxed to obtain a solution. We propose a new approach to exp...

We study a model in which voters choose between two candidates on the basis of both ideology and competence. While the ideology of the candidates is commonly known, voters are imperfectly informed about competence. Voter preferences, however, are such that it is a dominant strategy to vote according to ideology alone. When voting is compulsory, the candidate of the majority ideology prevails an...