# Pacos: Modeling Users' Interpretable and Context-Dependent Choices in Preference Reversals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05648 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05648/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Deep Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06114/) (2017)
- [Pointer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03134/) (2015)
- [Reinforcement learning based recommender systems: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06286/) (2021)
- [Discovering Context Effects from Raw Choice Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03266/) (2019)
- [Predicting Choice with Set-Dependent Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06365/) (2019)
- [Learning Interpretable Feature Context Effects in Discrete Choice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03417/) (2020)
- [Deep Choice Model Using Pointer Networks for Airline Itinerary Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05976/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Choice problems refer to selecting the best choices from several items, and learning users' preferences in choice problems is of great significance in understanding the decision making mechanisms and providing personalized services. Existing works typically assume that people evaluate items independently. In practice, however, users' preferences depend on the market in which items are placed, which is known as context effects; and the order of users' preferences for two items may even be reversed, which is referred to preference reversals. In this work, we identify three factors contributing to context effects: users' adaptive weights, the inter-item comparison, and display positions. We propose a context-dependent preference model named Pacos as a unified framework for addressing three factors simultaneously, and consider two design methods including an additive method with high interpretability and an ANN-based method with high accuracy. We study the conditions for preference reversals to occur and provide an theoretical proof of the effectiveness of Pacos in addressing preference reversals. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than prior works in predicting users' choices, and has great interpretability to help understand the cause of preference reversals.