Abstract. Watching television tends to be a social activity. So, adaptive television needs to adapt to groups of users rather than to individual users. In this paper, we discuss di¡erent strategies for combining individual user models to adapt to groups, some of which are inspired by Social Choice Theory. In a ¢rst experiment, we explore how humans select a sequence of items for a group to watch, based on data about the individuals' preferences. The results show that humans use some of the strategies such as the Average Strategy (a.k.a. Additive Utilitarian), the Average Without Misery Strategy and the Least Misery Strategy, and care about fairness and avoiding individual misery. In a second experiment, we investigate how satis¢ed people believe they would be with sequences chosen by di¡erent strategies, and how their satisfaction corresponds with that predicted by a number of satisfaction functions. The results show that subjects use normalization, deduct misery, and use the ratings in a non-linear way. One of the satisfaction functions produced reasonable, though not completely correct predictions. According to our subjects, the sequences produced by ¢ve strategies give satisfaction to all individuals in the group. The results also show that subjects put more emphasis than expected on showing the best rated item to each individual (at a cost of misery for another individual), and that the ratings of the ¢rst and last items in the sequence are especially important. In a ¢nal experiment, we explore the in£uence viewing an item can have on the ratings of other items. This is important for deciding the order in which to present items. The results show an e¡ect of both mood and topical relatedness.
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