Empirical studies of the connection between citizen preferences and legislator actions have largely focused on the preferences of a district’s average or median voter. While many theories suggest that preference heterogeneity should also affect this connection, few empirical analyses have rigorously tested claims about the distribution of individual voter preferences. In this paper, we use a un...

We present a simple and natural non-pricing mechanism for allocating divisible goods among strategic agents having lexicographic preferences. Our mechanism has favorable properties of strategy-proofness (incentive compatibility). In addition (and even when extended to the case of Leontief bundles) it enjoys Pareto efficiency, envy-freeness, and time efficiency. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F...

Improving physical activity patterns is an important focus in the treatment of chronic illnesses. We describe a system to monitor activity and provide feedback to help patients reach a healthy daily pattern. The system has shown positive effects in trials on patient groups including COPD and obese patients. We describe the design and implementation of a new feedback generation module which impr...

Generating satisfactory routes for driving requires data about the road network and an individual's relative weighting of available factors. We describe an interactive planning system that generates routes with the help of a driver and reenes its model of the driver's preferences through interaction. Results of a study indicate that it is possible to model drivers through feedback about relativ...

Generating satisfactory routes for driving requires data about the road network and an individual’s relative weighting of available factors. We describe an interactive planning system that generates routes with the help of a driver and refines its model of the driver’s preferences through interaction. Results of a study indicate that it is possible to model drivers through feedback about relati...

Models of user preferences are an important resource to improve the user experience of recommender systems. Using user feedback static preference models can be adapted over time. Still, if the options to choose from themselves have temporal extent, dynamic preferences have to be taken into account even when answering a single query. In this paper we propose that static preference models could b...

To help investigate the relationship between inflammatory and other diseases and the composition of the gut microbiota, we propose that a positive-feedback loop exists between the preferences of the host for a particular dietary regimen, the composition of the gut microbiota that depends on this regimen, and the preferences of the host as influenced by the gut microbiota. We cite evidence in su...

T he 2008 annual Math Awareness Month theme features the unusual combination of “Mathematics and Voting”. The importance of voting is obvious; indeed, with the United States election season hard upon us, discussions about voting are seemingly nonstop. More generally, on almost any day of any year the news media reports on some consequential election going on somewhere in the world. But what doe...

Most of the research in the area of evaluation function learning is focused on self-play. However in many domains, like chess, expert feedback is amply available in the form of annotated games. This feedback comes usually in the form of qualitative information due to the inability of humans to determine precise utility values for game states. We are presenting a first step towards integrating t...