We propose a method for modelling how dialogue moves influence and are influenced by the agents’ preferences. We extract constraints on preferences and dependencies among them, even when they are expressed indirectly, by exploiting discourse structure. Our method relies on a study of 20 dialogues chosen at random from the Verbmobil corpus. We then test the algorithms predictions against the judgements of naive annotators on 3 random unseen dialogues. The average annotator-algorithm agreement and the average inter-annotator agreement show that our method is reliable.