Preference elicitation for group decisions

Groups engaged in a mutual activity often need assistance in order to reach a joint decision. However, the group members' personal preferences are often unknown and need to be collected. Querying for preferences can annoy the users. We suggest employing a voting mechanism that finds a winning item under incomplete settings. We present a practical method for eliciting the preferences, so that with a minimal amount of queries a winning item that certainly suits the group can be computed. The heuristic incorporates probabilistic assumptions on the users' preferences and was evaluated on a real world datasets as well as on simulated data, showing a saving in queries to users.