Quality of Experience Under a Prospect Theoretic Perspective: A Cultural Heritage Space Use Case

Quality of experience (QoE), quantified via appropriately defined utility functions, has been widely used as a means to express user satisfaction in social systems. In such systems, subjects are usually assumed to be neutral utility maximizers, a concept that does not properly reflect the user risk-seeking behavior peculiarities. In this paper, we address the issue of incorporating and assessing the impact of visitor behavioral factors within the cultural heritage space, by exploiting the power of prospect theory. Exhibits of the cultural heritage site are organized in two main categories, namely, safe exhibits and common pool of resources (CPR) exhibits, based on their popularity and attractiveness. The latter ones are considered as nonexcludable and rivalrous resources in nature. Consequently, the obtained visitor QoE expressed via the prospect-theoretic utility function, heavily depends on the cumulative time spent by all visitors in these exhibits, thus making their behaviors and decisions interrelated, acting more like a social competitive environment. To determine visitor optimal time investment in different types of exhibits, while taking into account the potential interdependence of visitors decisions, a noncooperative game among the visitors is formulated and solved in a distributed manner, such that each visitor maximizes his own prospect-theoretic utility function. Detailed evaluation numerical results are presented, highlighting the operation and superiority of the proposed framework while providing useful insights about visitor decisions under realistic conditions and behaviors.