The performance of cumulative prospect theory's functional forms in decision-making behavior during building evacuation

Abstract

Understanding the performance of decision-making behavior in building evacuation is essential for predicting pedestrian dynamics, designing appropriate facility safety management, optimizing emergency management strategies, and reducing the impact of disasters. While many pedestrian movement models have been developed based on the hypothesis of rational and strategic decision-making, only a limited number of works consider individual psychology and irrational behavior. To address this issue, we have successfully integrated the cumulative prospect theory (CPT) into modeling evacuations. CPT is a prominent realistic decision-making theory that uses a value function and risky probability weighting function to transform outcomes and probabilities into subjective terms. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the researchers have examined the performance of different functional forms of CPT in evacuations. Therefore, this paper reviews several reported value functions, risky probability weighting functions, and relevant parameters suggested in previous studies. These variants were used to simulate evacuation movements, and the results were compared to experimental data. The study found that the Tversky-Kahneman function form, the most popular one, is robust with respect to variations in the value parameters and weighting parameters. In addition, Hensher et al.'s function form provided the best explanation for the experimental data.