This paper describes a method for planning with rich qualitative, temporally extended preferences (QTEPs) using lookahead heuristics inspired by those employed in state-of-the-art classical planners. Key to our approach is a transformation of the planning domain into an equivalent but simplified planning domain. First, compound preference formulae are transformed into simpler, equivalent prefer...

We consider voting over combinatorial domains, where alternatives are binary tuples. We assume that votes are specified as conditionally lexicographic preferences, or LP trees. We study aggregation problems of LP tree votes for several positional scoring rules. Our main goal is to demonstrate that answer-set programming can be effective in solving the winner and the evaluation problems for inst...

This article tries to explain the exceptional levels of knowledge creation in certain industrial clusters, levels that are seemingly higher than what is implied by the usual models of atomistic agents who do not internalize externalities. For this purpose, we introduce reference-dependent utility into an OLG model of an industrial cluster where agents allocate resources between consumption and ...

Core-selection is a crucial property of social choice functions, or rules, in social choice literature. It is also desirable to address the incentive of agents to cheat by misreporting their preferences. This paper investigates an exchange problem where each agent may have multiple indivisible goods, agents’ preferences over sets of goods are assumed to be lexicographic, and side payments are n...

OBJECTIVE To identify characteristics (factors) about health technology assessment (HTA) decisions that are important to the public in determining whether public engagement should be undertaken and the reasons for these choices. DESIGN Focus groups using a nominal group technique to identify and rank factors relevant to public engagement in HTA decision-making. Thematic analysis was also unde...

BACKGROUND Societal preferences have to be taken into consideration to ensure difficult healthcare decisions are legitimate and acceptable. It has been interesting to ascertain whether attitudes towards the principles of public healthcare resources allocation are homogenous. In particular, it has been thought provoking to ask whether advancement in medical technologies, and growing accessibilit...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions in order for binary voting choices over a finite number of pairs of alternatives to be consistent with voter preferences that admit concave utility representations. These conditions imply simple testable restrictions on the location of voters’ ideal points, and can be used to predict individual voting behavior. On the other hand, if the location of ...

People’s choices can be predicted given information about their preferences. Learning people’s preferences is the inverse problem of inferring preferences from choices. Given the apparent relationship between choice prediction and preference learning, it is natural to ask whether the two are mutually consistent. Given weak assumptions, we show that no single, consistent model of the relationshi...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...

In allocating goods with no use of monetary transfers, random allocation mechanisms can be designed in order to elicit information on preference intensities. I study the nontransfer allocation of two ex-ante identical objects under Bayesian incentive compatibility, with symmetric agents and independent private valuations. I …nd the ex-ante utilitarian-optimal mechanism, in which the probability...