01477031

Component

Transportation planners and engineers alike have identified that drivers’ risk attitudes have a significant effect on their route and departure time choices. The authors utilize methods from experimental economics to elicit risk attitudes through controlled incentivized experiments in driving simulators with actual monetary consequences. This last feature of the design can eliminate hypothetical biases observed in other studies that utilize purely hypothetical questions. They identify risk attitudes by defining simulated route choices as lotteries that may pay some money for sure or different monetary rewards with some uncertainty. They also use structural estimation to estimate risk attitudes in the sample and allow for both Expected Utility theory and Rank-Dependent Utility theory. The econometric approach applies the “contextual utility” correction by Wilcox (2011) to control for “size effects” that have been identified in the estimation of value of time and reliability. The experimental design allows the authors to compare risk attitudes across two different regions in the US and study the demographic determinants of risk aversion. Both under Expected Utility and Rank-Dependent Utility, risk attitudes are heterogeneous in the sample and largely explained by subjects’ age and accumulated wealth during the experiment. Finally, the authors find no evidence of a structural difference between the two traffic regions used in this study.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE25 Congestion Pricing.

01470560

13-3585

English

22p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Demographics; Economic factors; Risk taking; Route choice; Travel behavior; Utility theory; Value of time

Willingness to pay

Atlanta (Georgia); Orlando (Florida)

Economics; Finance; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3585

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:43PM