The influence of user decisions on subjective quality assessment ratings

A large number of studies in the fields of consumer research, psychology and sociology have shown that individual user decisions influence people's satisfaction and likeability in the context of service consumption. However, so far this user-related aspect has been neglected in the context of QoE. To address this issue, we conducted three empirical user studies in which the participants were able to individually select the impairment type of the video stream, the user terminal or the content for Web Browsing. Our results show that indeed individual user decisions influence the subjective quality evaluation. However, the observed effect is not straightforward to predict and varies strongly with service type. Our findings can be used to improve QoE modelling and QoE management by including user decisions as an additional significant impact factor.