ORDINAL PREFERENCE REPRESENTATIONS

Ordinal preferences have several advantages over the traditional cardi nal expressions of preference. Three different representations of ordi nal preferences useful in multi-participant modelling are presented, a nd their features compared. One approach is the payoff representation that is based on an ordinal normal form game. A second representation of ordinal preferences is the preference vector, based on the option f orm of the game. The option form consists of a list of players, with e ach prayer followed by the options under its control. The third repres entation of ordinal preferences is the preference tree. A preference t ree is an implied binary tree that captures the information of prefere nce vector in a more compact manner by making use of its lexicographic structure. The preference tree offers considerable compactness and co mputational efficiency over the other two approaches.