The last two decades have seen a growing interest in the development of automated agents that are able to negotiate on the user’s behalf. When representing a user in a negotiation, it is essential for the agent to understand the user’s preferences, without exposing them to elicitation fatigue. To this end, we propose a new model in which a negotiating agent may incrementally elicit the user’s p...

Context: This research deals with requirements elicitation technique selection for software product requirements and the overselection of open interviews. Objectives: This paper proposes and validates a framework to help requirements engineers select the most adequate elicitation techniques at any time. Method: We have explored both the existing underlying theory and the results of empirical re...

Groups engaged in a mutual activity often need assistance in order to reach a joint decision. However, the group members’ personal preferences are often unknown and need to be collected. Querying for preferences can annoy the users. We suggest employing a voting mechanism that finds a winning item under incomplete settings. We present a practical method for eliciting the preferences, so that wi...

The increasing complexity of products and services being offered by businesses has made providing customers with easy access to technical assistance an important business function. Therefore, most businesses operate call centers to respond to product related queries from consumers. An emerging model is to let a third-party to run the contact center for a business. Preference elicitation the pro...

An example of using the approach to requirements elicitation proposed in report R42 is presented. The design of a prototype tool to support the use of this approach is described and a description of the way in which this prototype may be used is given. The success of the prototyping exercise is discussed and implications for the further development of the proposed approach to requirements elici...

For product rating environments, similar to that of Amazon Reviews, it has been shown that the truthful elicitation of feedback is possible through mechanisms which pay buyer reports contingent on the reports of other buyers. We study whether similar mechanisms can be designed for reputation mechanisms at online auction sites where the buyers’ experiences are partially determined by a strategic...

We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us to obtain a posterior distribution on the agent’s preferences, policy and optionally, the obtained reward sequence, from observations. We examine the relati...

We test whether induced mood states have an effect on elicited risk and time preferences in a conventional laboratory experiment. We jointly estimate risk and time preferences and find that subjects induced into a negative mood exhibit economically significant higher risk aversion than those in the control treatment. Those in the positive mood treatment exhibit even higher risk aversion. We fin...

Contradictions in requirements are inevitable in early project stages. To resolve these contradictions, it is necessary to know the rationales (goals) that lead to the particular requirements. In early project stages one stakeholder rarely knows the goals of the others. Sometimes the stakeholders cannot explicitly state even their own goals. Thus, the goals have to be elaborated in the process ...