Study Of Public Decision-Making Behavior For Air Quality Improvement Based On Utility-Regret Joint Mechanism

Air pollution is high on the global agenda due its harmful impact on human health and the economy.Severe air pollution can cause significant economic losses in industries including agriculture,transportation,and tourism,making it a key obstacle to achieving ecological civilization and synergistic economic development.In-depth focus on public demand for air pollution management and accurately quantify the monetary value of air quality improvement are prerequisites for the government to formulate sustainable air pollution management policies.Therefore,it is important to build a reasonable evaluation model that can predict people’s decisionmaking behavior accurately and evaluate the non-market value of air quality scientifically.Discrete choice experiment(DCE)is a stated preference method based on decision behavior theory,which has been widely used to explain and analyze public choice behavior and preferences,and to assess the economic value of environmental goods.However,previous studies have adopted a one-sizefits-all approach,assuming that all respondents make choices based on a single decision mechanism.In the context of heterogeneous respondents and attributes,homogeneous decision processes are limited in exploring public preferences and welfare estimates.Therefore,this paper considers decision mechanism heterogeneity and constructs a hybrid discrete choice model to conduct the following research: 1)To overcome the limitations of a single decision mechanism in traditional discrete choice experiments,this study introduces a hybrid discrete choice model with decision mechanism heterogeneity at the attribute level and a latent class model with decision mechanism heterogeneity at the respondent level from the perspective of the utility-regret joint mechanism.It proposes a paradigm for public air quality improvement behavior under the assumption of the utility regret joint mechanism;2)building on the above research,considering that non-rational factors such as psychological emotions,risk attitudes,and behavior perception can influence people’s decisionmaking behavior,this study incorporates risk perception into the latent class utility-regret model by constructing an integrated latent variable and a latent class utility-regret framework.It further investigates how public risk perception impact the heterogeneity of decision-making mechanisms for air pollution control measures.The specific research contents and findings are summarized as follows:Firstly,based on regret theory and random utility theory,multinomial logit models for air quality improvement schemes were conducted.Empirical analysis were conducted using survey data collected in Harbin,comparing the log-likelihood and other goodness-of-fit indicators as well as the significance of the coefficients of the two models.The results of the two models were basically consistent,verifying the effectiveness of the two choice paradigms in the context of air quality improvement.Secondly,a hybrid utility-regret model with heterogeneous attributes was constructed by stepwise regression analysis,in which the policy delay years attribute for air quality improvement followed random regret minimization,while attributes including the ratio of good air days,heavily polluted days,premature death caused by air pollution,and price followed random utility maximization.As expected,the hybrid utility-regret model has the best goodness-of-fit,confirming heterogeneous decision mechanism preference among different attributes and indicating that respondents will adopt different decision rules based on different attribute characteristics.This breaks the limitations of the previous assumption of a single decision mechanism in environmental management and provides new insights for relevant scholars to predict and analyze decision makers’ behavior preferences when constructing discrete choice models.Furthermore,it offers a new perspective for analyzing public decision-making behavior and evaluating the value of public goods in future environmental management.Thirdly,in order to explore the heterogeneity of decision-making behavior among different respondents,a latent class utility-regret(LC-UR)model based on traditional latent class models was constructed,with regret minimization and utility maximization as class members respectively.The results show that the goodness-of-fit of the LC-UR model was greatly improved compared to the discrete choice model under a single decision rule,confirming the heterogeneity of decision-making mechanism among heterogeneous respondents.The majority(57.2%)of the respondents in the air quality improvement adopted random regret minimization decision rules.Finally,the driving factors behind the heterogeneity of individual decision-making mechanisms are analyzed.In this study,the objective air pollution risk perceived subjectively by the public was quantified in the form of five-point Likert scale,and it was incorporated into the LCUR model together with economic attributes as a classification member function in the way of latent variables.A comprehensive analysis framework of Latent Variable and Latent Class Utility-Regret(LVLC-UR)was established to analyze the public’s heterogeneous choice behavior of air quality improvement programs.The internal mechanism of individual behavior heterogeneity caused by risk perception heterogeneity caused by individual differences in improving air quality was also discussed.The empirical results support the model framework proposed in this paper,indicating that risk perception is an important factor affecting the heterogeneity of individual behavior to improve air quality.After the inclusion of risk perception latent variables,the probability of respondents following regret minimization decision rules increased from 57.2% to 61.36%.Among them,respondents with higher risk controllability tended to follow completely rational decision rules(utility maximization)and were more willing to reduce the number of heavy pollution days.The respondents with higher risk susceptibility were more inclined to follow the bounded rational decision rule(regret minimization),and were more willing to increase the proportion of good air days and shorten the policy delay years.Therefore,the promotion of air pollution prevention and control policies should be carried out according to the characteristics of the population,so as to meet the preferences and needs of different groups.In addition,the results further indicate that the public’s risk perception affects the public’s willingness to pay for air quality improvement attributes by influencing the preference heterogeneity of the decision-making mechanism in the selection process of air quality improvement schemes.This study constructed a reasonable evaluation model to accurately predict the public’s decision-making behavior and scientifically evaluate the economic value of air quality improvement,systematically analyzed the heterogeneous selection behavior of the public to improve air quality and its sources,and clarified the main behavioral driving factors of the public in the decision making of air quality improvement programs.The research results enrich and improve the relevant theories and methods of discrete choice model,expand the research of decision-making behavior,improve the scientific evaluation results,and provide the theoretical basis and decision-making reference for the government to formulate air pollution control policies.