On polynomial-time preference elicitation with value queries

Preference elicitation — the process of asking queries to determine parties’ preferences — is a key part of many problems in electronic commerce. For example, a shopping agent needs to know a user’s preferences in order to correctly act on her behalf, and preference elicitation can help an auctioneer in a combinatorial auction determine how to best allocate a given set of items to a given set of bidders. Unfortunately, in the worst case, preference elicitation can require an exponential number of queries even to determine an approximately optimal allocation. In this paper we study natural special cases of preferences for which elicitation can be done in polynomial time via value queries. The cases we consider all have the property that the preferences (or approximations to them) can be described in a polynomial number of bits, but the issue here is whether they can be elicited using the natural (limited) language of value queries. We make a connection to computational learning...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Martin Zinkevich, Avrim Blum, Tuomas Sandholm
• Keywords: Polynomial Time, Preference Elicitation, Preferences, SIGECOM 2003