The influence of latent lifestyle on acceptance of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS): A hierarchical latent variable and latent class approach

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how people’s lifestyles are associated with their willingness to adopt a relatively new and innovative mobility solution, Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS). The lifestyle is conceptualized as a combination of a mechanistic lifestyle manifested by an individual’s activity-travel patterns and a psychographic lifestyle depicted by an individual’s psychological traits. We propose a hierarchical latent variable and latent class model in which respondents are probabilistically allocated to one of the latent classes based upon mechanistic lifestyle, whereas psychographic lifestyle is incorporated in the model as values and personality traits exerting impact on attitudes which themselves are part of the utility function of MaaS subscription choice. The model is calibrated by the data emanated from a stated choice experiment and a lifestyle survey distributed among 1299 respondents in the Netherlands. The results confirm that psychographic lifestyles play a substantial role in people’s decision to subscribe to MaaS. Having positive attitudes towards multimodal travel increases the propensity to adopt MaaS, where the attitudes are moderated by values and personality traits significantly. Moreover, mechanistic lifestyles, having non car-oriented modality lifestyle in particular, enable to segment the respondents to two latent classes showing their preference heterogeneity.