Title
What Are Preferences? And If So, How Many?
Presenter
Anthony Jameson, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)
Abstract
The term “preferences” is used frequently in the recommender systems field, but its meaning is seldom explained – an omission that raises
the question of what, if anything, “preferences” might be. This talk invites participants to join in an attempt to answer this question.
We start with a compact overview of the diverse ways in which people make small choices and larger decisions, drawing from a number of areas of psychological
research that are mostly viewed separately, ranging from instrumental conditioning to decision analysis. We then look at the various ways in which the term
“preferences” is used in the recommender systems field, considering how the uses can be understood in terms of these psychological concepts.
We will see that the term implicitly and alternately refers to a variety of things, including specific evaluations and general values; affective responses and
attitudes; individual policies and social norms; specific choices, learned patterns of choice, habits; and the radio buttons that people select on a
“Preferences” screen. A concluding recommendation is that we should avoid thinking about “preferences” as such and focus instead on the
better-understood and more interesting phenomena from which it has been distracting our attention.
Short Bio
Anthony Jameson is a principal researcher at DFKI, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Some of his research since the early 1980s has concerned various forms of recommendation, including systems that conduct recommendation dialogs, employ
decision-theoretic planning, exploit digital life logs, and/or make recommendations to groups. He is the author of the chapter Choices and Decisions of
Computer Users in the forthcoming third edition of the Human-Computer Interaction Handbook and founding coeditor-in-chief (with John Riedl) of
the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (http://tiis.acm.org).
The title of this talk was inspired by that of a popular philosophy book by Richard David Precht.