In an important paper, Amrita Dhillon [3] provided a multi-profile version of Harsanyi’s [5] single-profile theorem on utilitarianism. Like Harsanyi, she assumed that the social alternatives are lotteries. Individuals’ preferences satisfy the von Neumann-Morgenstern (vN-M) axioms, and have thus an expected utility representation. A social welfare function maps profiles of individuals’ preferenc...

We describe a pronoun interpretation experiment in which a Coherence Hypothesis is tested against preference-based analyses of pronoun interpretation, including the Parallel Function Preference and the Subject Preference. We demonstrate that preferences can be systematically disrupted through the manipulation of coherence, and that only the Coherence Hypothesis can predict the full range of cor...

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) offer a powerful approach for the description and resolution of cooperative multi-agent problems. In this model, a group of agents coordinate their actions to optimize a global objective function, taking into account their preferences or constraints. A core limitation of this model is the assumption that the preferences of all agents or the c...

We characterize preference relations over bounded below Anscombe and Aumann’s acts and give necessary and su¢ cient conditions that guarantee the existence of a utility function u on consequences, a con…dence function ' on the set of all probabilities over states of nature and a positive threshold level of con…dence 0 such that our preference relation has a functional representation J , where g...

Fehr and Schmidt (1999) introduced an influential utility function for individuals in interpersonal contexts that captures self-centered inequity aversion. The power of this utility function lies in its good balance between parsimony and fit. This paper provides a preference foundation for exactly the model of Fehr and Schmidt (FS), so that the preference conditions satisfy exactly FS’s balance...

Revealed preference theory was initiated by Samuelson [8] as a way of defining the rational behaviour of a consumer in terms of a preference relation associated with a demand function. This topic has been axiomatically treated by Arrow (1959), Richter (1966), Sen (1971) and many others. Papers Banerjee (1995), Georgescu (2004; 2005) attempt at developing a theory of revealed preference for fuzz...

We construct an algebraic model of the social choice theory. First we give an arithmetic proof of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Next we apply our algebraic method to single-peaked preference domain to establish two theorems. (i) A value of Arrovian social welfare function on single peaked preference domain is single-plateaued with at most two maximal elements. (ii) An ordering by majority voti...

Female mate choice is a driving force in the evolution of male secondary sexual characters. It can be dissected into several components: discrimination describes the degree to which females distinguish male trait variation, responsiveness indicates the speed or likelihood of females’ reactions to a mate, and preference functions illustrate how the probability of mating relates to male trait var...

This paper is concerned with the following question: How to choose among Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) methods to solve dynamic decision making problems under uncertainty? To address this question, a methodology has been proposed, which is based on a characterization of the MCDA methods. The MCDA methods are characterized according to 1) sufficient conditions that allow their use to solve ...

The term “preference learning” refers to the application of machine learning methods for inducing preference models from empirical data. In the recent literature, corresponding problems appear in various guises. After a brief overview of the field, this work focuses on a particular learning scenario called label ranking, where the problem is to learn a mapping from instances to rankings over a ...