Our short paper titled "A QoE Prisoner's Dilemma: Quantifying Benefits and Drawbacks of Individual QoE Management," has been accepted to the 18th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX 2026), which will take place from June 29 to July 3, 2026, in Cardiff, Wales.

The paper investigates the practicability of individual Quality of Experience (QoE) management in communication networks. Traditional QoE management typically relies on QoE models derived from aggregated user ratings such as Mean Opinion Scores (MOS), which represent the average user experience. In contrast, the presented work explores individual QoE management approaches that incorporate direct user feedback to infer personalized QoE models and enable user-specific network resource allocation.

Our paper demonstrates that individual QoE management can improve both user satisfaction and QoE fairness compared to conventional MOS-based approaches when users provide honest feedback. However, the paper also reveals a fundamental drawback: systems relying solely on subjective user feedback are vulnerable to strategic manipulation. Drawing parallels to the classical prisoner’s dilemma, such that users are incentivized to falsely report poor QoE in order to obtain more favorable resource allocations. As a result, individual QoE management can collapse to equal resource allocation, eliminating its potential benefits and reducing both overall QoE and fairness.

Paper: Johannes Schleicher, Michael Seufert. "A QoE Prisoner's Dilemma: Quantifying Benefits and Drawbacks of Individual QoE Management." 18th International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX 2026), June 29-July 3, 2026, Cardiff, Wales.

Link to the paper: Available after the conference