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<article-title>Eliciting Single-Peaked Preferences Using Comparison Queries</article-title>
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<author><a href="mailto:conitzer@cs.duke.edu"><name>Vincent Conitzer</name></a></author>
<aff>Duke University Department of Computer Science Durham, NC 27708, USA</aff>
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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Voting is a general method for aggregating the preferences
of multiple agents. Each agent ranks all the possible alternatives,
and based on this, an aggregate ranking of the
alternatives (or at least a winning alternative) is produced.
However, when there are many alternatives, it is impractical
to simply ask agents to report their complete preferences.
Rather, the agents' preferences, or at least the relevant
parts thereof, need to be <italic>elicited</italic>. This is done by asking
the agents a (hopefully small) number of simple queries
about their preferences, such as <italic>comparison</italic> queries, which
ask an agent to compare two of the alternatives. Prior work
on preference elicitation in voting has focused on the case
of unrestricted preferences. It has been shown that in this
setting, it is sometimes necessary to ask each agent (almost)
as many queries as would be required to determine an arbitrary
ranking of the alternatives. By contrast, in this paper,
we focus on single-peaked preferences. We show that such
preferences can be elicited using only a linear number of
comparison queries, if either the order with respect to which
preferences are single-peaked is known, or at least one other
agent's complete preferences are known. We also show that
using a sublinear number of queries will not suffice. Finally,
we present experimental results.</p>
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