Abstract
Existing user equilibrium models of activity-travel scheduling generally fall short in representing travelers’ decision-making processes. The majority have either implicitly or explicitly assumed that travelers follow the principle of utility maximization. This assumption ignores the fact that individuals may be loss–averse when making activity-travel decisions. Allowing for the situation that travelers possess accurate information of the urban-transportation system due to modern technologies, studies on reference-dependent decision-making under near-perfect information are receiving increasing attention. In view of traveler heterogeneity, individuals can be divided into multiple classes according to their reference points. In this paper, we propose a reference-dependent multi-class user equilibrium model for activity-travel scheduling, which can be reformulated as a variational inequality problem. Moreover, comparative analyses are conducted on the equilibrium states between utility-maximization (no reference) and reference-dependency of exogenous and endogenous references. A numerical example regarding combined departure-time and mode choice for commuting is conducted to illustrate the proposed model. The simulated results indicate that reference points and loss aversion attitudes have significant effects on the choice of departure time and mode.
Highlights
Over the past decades, increasing attention has been paid to the activity-based modeling paradigm in the study of activity-travel behavior
A reference-dependent user equilibrium model is proposed for activity-travel scheduling problem within a simplified multi-state supernetwork representation
Travelers are divided into various classes based on their time-dependent and endogenous reference points/categories
Summary
Over the past decades, increasing attention has been paid to the activity-based modeling paradigm in the study of activity-travel behavior. Reference-dependent theory under risk or uncertainty originated from well-known (cumulative) prospect theory proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), in which only one attribute of alternatives was considered Later, they (Tversky and Kahneman 1991) extended the decision-making problem to the multi-attribute case under certainty. This study proposes a reference-dependent user equilibrium model under certainty (no risk) for activity-travel scheduling. It enriches a growing body of literature of integrating activity-travel scheduling and dynamic traffic assignment by incorporating a more behaviorally sound choice-making mechanism. The user equilibrium model in this study is examined in a simplified multi-state supernetwork through which any path corresponds to an activity-travel pattern, consisting of time-dependent activity and travel links (Liao et al 2013a).
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