Learning context-dependent preferences from raw data

Abstract

A large body of existing work in social science as well as computer science attempts to infer preferences of individuals from the actions they take. This includes research areas such as industrial organization [4], marketing [1], political science [12], analysis of auctions [3], recommender systems [8], search engine ranking [9], and many others. The workhorse model used either implicitly or explicitly in these disparate literatures is the rational choice model.