A Sociotechnical Approach to the Museum Congestion Management Problem

Abstract

In this article, a sociotechnical consideration of the congestion management problem in museums is presented, by treating museums as dynamic social systems, where the momentum of the experience is controlled by visitors themselves. Visitors are considered as prospect-theoretic utility maximizers, whose behavioral risk attitudes affect not only their personal decisions and experiences but also those of others, thus creating an interdependent social system. To address the congestion problem within such a probabilistic and uncertain environment, pricing is introduced as an effective mechanism to drive visitor actions in efficient operation points, preserving museum operation stability. The corresponding problem of determining the time invested by each visitor at museum exhibits toward optimizing their obtained experience, as expressed via properly designed prospect-theoretic utility functions with pricing, is formulated and treated as a noncooperative game. The theory of S-modular games is adopted to prove existence and convergence to Nash equilibrium. Based on this framework, we study and analyze the validity and effectiveness of pricing as a tool to manage congestion in museums.