Research On Pricing Strategy Of Suburban Railway Based On Passenger Behavior Choice

Along with the steady progress of urbanization,the traffic demand between large urban center area and surrounding town groups continues to grow.Suburban railway has gradually become a scientific choice for large cities to solve the traffic connection problem and relieve the travel pressure in central areas.However,there is not yet a perfect fare formulation system on the outskirts of our country.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to discuss the strategies of fare formulation.As suburban railway is a quasi-public product,its pricing strategy should consider the economic and social benefits.Different passengers have their own unique travel preferences and perception differences.Traditional economics assumes that the utility theory of passengers’ completely rational state is difficult to accurately describe the travel choice behavior of passengers.Therefore,this paper,from the perspective of two-layer decision-making of limited rationality between railway operators and passengers,subdivides passenger transport market,introduces cumulative prospect theory of behavioral economics,establishes a suburban railway pricing model based on cumulative prospect theory,and deeply studies the pricing strategy of suburban railway.The specific content is as follows:At first,the paper defines the concept of suburban railway,analyzes the specific factors affecting its ticket price,compares the pricing strategies of foreign suburban railway horizontally,and summarizes the problems in pricing strategies of our suburban railway.This paper describes the adaptability of the two-layer programming model as the basic framework of this model.Compared with the utility theory,this paper analyzes the advantages of the cumulative prospect theory based on the passenger finite rationality condition to study the travel choice behavior of suburban passengers.Secondly,the factors influencing the travel choice behavior of suburban passengers are analyzed to subdivide the passenger transport market,and the analytic hierarchy process is used to calibrate the weight of transport service attributes.The travel influencing factors were converted into time value,and the generalized travel utility expression of suburban passengers was derived.Then the cumulative prospect theory was introduced to edit and evaluate,and the individual travel decision-making model based on the cumulative prospect theory was introduced into the lower level planning.Combined with the upper level programming which takes the income maximization of railway transportation enterprises as the decision-making objective,a two-level programming pricing model based on the cumulative prospect theory is constructed to design the genetic algorithm.Finally,the pricing model is selected from Chengdu to Dujiangyan,and the processing examples and questionnaire data are substituted into the pricing model.The software solution results show that: compared with the single pricing method based on passenger transport market segmentation,the passenger share of suburban railway is reduced by 151 passengers,down 1%;The total revenue of railway enterprises increased by 14158 yuan,up by 6.5%.This paper verifies the rationality of the suburban railway pricing model based on cumulative prospect theory,and puts forward some suggestions on pricing strategies based on examples to enrich the suburban railway pricing strategies.