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Utility extraction is the semi-automatic acquisition of decision maker's preferences about the different outcomes of a decision problem.

Research has focused on three different areas:

  • eliciting the utility function based on a database of already elicited utility functions;
  • iterative refinement of the decision maker’s current utility function using a value of information approach;
  • eliciting the utility function based on a database of observed behavioral patterns.

The last approach implies that preferences are reflected in the behavior, and that the decision maker is behavioral consistent. As real-world behaviors and decisions are often not consistent, methods based on such assumptions can extract only trivial utility functions. Thomas D. Nielsen and Finn V. Jensen (Learning a decision maker’s utility function from (possibly) inconsistent behavior) proposed two algorithms that can take into account inconsistent behaviors, in order to reflect human preferences in real contexts.

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