This article examines prospects for theories and methods of preferences, both in the specific sense of the preferences of the ideal rational agents considered in economics and decision theory and in the broader interplay between reasoning and rationality considered in philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Modern appli- cations seek to employ preferences as means for specifying, designing, and controlling rational behaviors as well as descriptive means for understanding behaviors. We seek to understand the nature and representation of preferences by examining the roles, origins, meaning, structure, evolution, and application of preferences. The notion of preference, formerly of concern primarily to philosophers, economists, and psychologists, has in recent years drawn new attention from students of artificial intel- ligence. The new studies follow earlier work in using formalized preferences to understand and characterize agents of limited rationality, but go beyond the earlier studies by using for- malized preferences as means for designing, instructing, and controlling such agents as well. These new investigations place additional theoretical and practical burdens on the preference formalizations. In the following, we examine some prospects for preferences in light of problems gener- ated by the new burdens of agent design and control. We claim that proper understanding of preferences requires acknowledging that the origin and purpose of preferences matter to their structure, that preferences play many roles in reasoning, that different roles call for different representations, and that preference changes pervade deliberation and action. If true, these claims leave us with many more questions than answers regarding preferences. We organize the discussion around the fundamental questions of the nature, roles, structure, representa- tion, and evolution of preference. We do not attempt a complete survey of the field or the literature, but instead present a selection of topics that reflects a personal view of the issues. The present article builds on the earlier introduction (Doyle and Thomason 1999).
['Jon Doyle']
Prospects for Preferences