Elicitation of factored utilities

As automated decision support becomes increasingly accessible in a wide variety of AI applications, addressing the preference bottleneck is vital. Specifically, since the ability to make reasonable decisions on behalf […]
The effective tailoring of decisions to the needs and desires of specific users requires automated mechanisms for preference assessment. We provide a brief overview of recent direct preference elicitation methods: these methods ask users to answer (ideally, a small number of queries regarding their preferences and use this information to recommend a feasible decision that would be (approximately) optimal given those preferences. We argue for the importance of assessing numerical utilities rather than qualitative preferences and survey several utility elicitation techniques from artificial intelligence, operations research, and conjoint analysis.