In decision making, negotiation, and other kinds of practical reasoning, it is necessary to model preferences over possible outcomes. Such preferences usually depend on multiple criteria. We argue that the criteria by which outcomes are evaluated should be the satisfaction of a person’s underlying interests: the more an outcome satisfies his interests, the more preferred it is. Underlying inter...

We examine racial preferences in dating. We employ a Speed Dating experiment that allows us to directly observe individual decisions and thus infer whose preferences lead to racial segregation in romantic relationships. Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males. The richness of our data further allows us to identify many determinants of same-race preferences. Subjects’ backgrounds,...

Given positive integers d and n, there is an integer N such that for every injective map ffrom { 1 ..... N} a into R there is a subset A = A1 x A2 x ... × Ad of { 1 ..... N} a such that (1) each Aj has n elements, (2) the restriction of f to A is monotone in each coordinate, (3) there is an ordering of the coordinates such that f on A is texicographic with respect to that ordering. Because inje...

The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I offer a cautionary note regarding this conclusion. I demonstrate that even on those issues for which the preferences of the wealthy and those in the middle diverge, policy ...

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...

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...

CP-nets represent the dominant existing framework for expressing qualitative conditional preferences between alternatives, and are used in a variety of areas including constraint solving. Over the last fifteen years, a significant literature has developed exploring semantics, algorithms, implementation and use of CP-nets. This paper introduces a comprehensive new framework for conditional prefe...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...