An Empirical Study On The Willingness To Pay For Autonomous Driving And Its Influencing Factors

As a new way to travel,autonomous vehicle has provided the possibility to solve serious road congestion,low traffic efficiency,traffic safety and other problems in urban traffic.But it remains to be seen whether self-driving cars will be adopted on a large scale,whether they will replace traditional cars and to what extent,and their development depends not only on the maturity of the technology and the support of government policies,but also on public acceptance.In addition,the public’s willingness to pay for and use self-driving technology is one of the prerequisites for the success of self-driving cars in the market.Therefore,it is particularly important to understand the public’s willingness to pay for self-driving cars and to study the influencing mechanism of the willingness to pay.In this paper,the research results of the willingness to pay for self-driving cars in recent years were retrieved from multiple databases,and the research results were systematically summarized from the four perspectives of the payment amount,payment proportion,influencing factors and analysis methods.In order to study the decisive factors influencing the willingness to pay,based on the existing research on the basis of considering the social and economic attributes(sex,age,level of education,income,marital status,whether to have a driver’s license,etc.),and the perceived risk,trust,and on the basis of the perceived benefits of extension attitude and perceived behavior control,subjective norms three psychological latent variables.This paper,for the first time,combines planned behavior theory and trust heuristic theory to construct the theoretical framework of automatic driving willingness to pay,and proposes 13 hypotheses according to the research purpose and theoretical framework.328 valid questionnaires were obtained through field investigation.Using structural equation model,neural network model and multi-index causal model to analyze data,and structural equation model firstly identify the variables have significant influence on willingness to pay,then the neural network is adopted to get important forecast factors in the structural equation model,the importance of sort,it is concluded that the most important influencing factors.The multi-index multi-causality model is used to analyze the influence of social and economic attributes on psychological latent variables.While verifying the applicability of the planned behavior theory and the trust heuristic theory to analyze the payment willingness model of self-driving cars,this study concludes that perceived behavior control,attitude,perceived income and trust have significant positive influence on the payment willingness,while perceived risk has significant negative influence on the willingness to pay.Among them,perceived risk and trust are the most significant variables affecting the willingness to pay.In addition,in the socio-economic attributes,gender and marriage are significant factors affecting the willingness to pay.Based on the research results,this paper puts forward several Suggestions to autonomous vehicle manufacturers and relevant policy making departments,so as to provide a basis for policy makers to formulate relevant policies on autonomous vehicles and provide a useful reference for autonomous vehicle manufacturers to design and publicize relevant products.