A Prospect Theory-Based Study Of Travelers’ Choice Behavior

With the continuous advancement of transportation construction,urban travel options as a hot research issue in the field of urban transportation has attracted more and more scholars at home and abroad to conduct research in recent years.Many studies have been conducted within the framework of expected utility theory,which considers the traveler to be a fully rational person who has all the information about travel,but in real life,the traveler does not have all the information about transportation,and the actual decision is not necessarily the most rational.The actual travel decisions of travelers are influenced by their own multiple factors and the external environment,and during the actual travel process they will show different risk appetite,exhibit the characteristics of irrational people,and do not meet the relevant assumptions of the theory of expected utility.Foresight theory can well reflect the multiple risk appetite of the practitioner,and its applicability in an uncertain environment has been validated by a large number of studies,this paper analyzes the principles and applicability scenarios comparing expected utility theory and foresight theory and chooses to construct a decision model based on foresight theory.This paper first elaborates on the basic content of the travel choice problem,analyzes the general process of travel decision making,analyzes the characteristics and applicable scenarios of various alternative modes of transportation by category,and comprehensively analyzes the risk factors that travelers may encounter during the travel process and the influence of internal and external factors on the decision-making process.For the purpose of the study,the group of travellers was classified according to their personal characteristics and purpose of travel.A hierarchy of trip selection models was then identified,i.e.,a model structure in which the trip mode is selected first and the path is selected later.The principal component analysis method was used to screen out the most influential factors among the complex influencing factors as the main explanatory variables for determining the reference points,to analyze the relationship between the individual risk appetite coefficients and the corresponding reference points,to improve the calculation of the risk appetite coefficients and to finalize the determination of the reference points for each type of traveler.To reflect the process of accumulation of travel experience and the role of travel experience in subsequent travel activities and to describe the process of updating the perceived integrated travel costs,this paper introduces a Bayesian update model that divides the update process into two parts,before the travel occurs and after the travel is completed,to complete the calculation of perceived integrated travel costs.In the subsequent stages of model editing,the value function,the perceived probability function and the decision weighting function are determined to complete the travel decision model.Finally,representative sections of the road network were selected as examples,and the traditional expected utility theory model and the travel decision model based on prospect theory established in this paper were calculated in conjunction with the statistical data obtained from the questionnaire,and the results of the model calculation and survey statistics were compared and analyzed.The results show that the travel decision model computed under the prospect theory framework can better simulate the decision making behavior of real-life travelers than the expected utility theory model.