Short Introduction to Preferences

Computational social choice is an expanding field that merges classical topics like economics and voting theory with more modern topics like artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, and computational complexity. This book provides a concise introduction to the main research lines in this field, covering aspects such as preference modelling, uncertainty reasoning, social choice, stable matching, and computational aspects of preference aggregation and manipulation. The book is centered around the notion of preference reasoning, both in the single-agent and the multi-agent setting. It presents the main approaches to modeling and reasoning with preferences, with particular attention to two popular and powerful formalisms, soft constraints and CP-nets. The authors consider preference elicitation and various forms of uncertainty in soft constraints. They review the most relevant results in voting, with special attention to computational social choice. Finally, the book considers preferences in matching problems. The book is intended for students and researchers who may be interested in an introduction to preference reasoning and multi-agent preference aggregation, and who want to know the basic notions and results in computational social choice. Table of Contents: Introduction / Preference Modeling and Reasoning / Uncertainty in Preference Reasoning / Aggregating Preferences / Stable Marriage Problems

Francesca Rossi is a full professor of Computer Science at the University of Padova, Italy. She works on constraint programming, preference reasoning, and multi-agent preference aggregation. She has published over 150 papers on these topics, and she has edited 16 volumes between collections of articles and special issues. She has been conference chair of CP 1998, program chair of CP 2003, and conference organizer of ADT 2009. She will be program chair of IJCAI 2013. She is a co-editor of the Handbook of Constraint Programming, with Peter Van Beek and Toby Walsh, published by Elsevier in 2006. She has been the president of the Association for Constraint Programming from 2003 to 2007.She is a member of the advisory board of JAIR (where she has been associate editor in 2005-2007) and of the editorial board of Constraints and of the AI Journal,an associate editor of AMAI,and a column editor for the Journal of Logic and Computation. She is an ECCAI fellow.