01516076

Component

Leisure activities are often conducted by individuals jointly with others implying that preferences for these activities are the result of a group interaction. In this study, a decision process is assumed where individuals involved do proposals for options and respond to proposals done by others. When preferences are conflicting individuals must trade-off between self-interest and the interests of others. A central hypothesis in this study is that fairness considerations play a significant role. To estimate a social utility function, individuals are presented choice tasks where they do proposals or respond to proposals in situations where preferences for options in the group are manipulated by an experimental design. A representative sample (N = 315) of individuals participated in the experiment. Estimation results of a discrete mixture model show that, in line with the hypothesis, fairness indeed plays a significant role. Individuals display a preference for options where losses or gains are more equally distributed in the group even when this comes at the costs of personal or group outcomes. Interestingly, the social utility function is asymmetric; compromise solutions are favored more strongly when consequences relate to costs (travel costs) than when they concern rewards (positive preferences). Furthermore, there are significant personal differences in how people make the trade-offs influenced by gender and age. It is concluded that the model proposed in this study offers new insights in joint activity choice behavior as well as a more flexible framework to model the behavior compared to existing models that assumed an aggregated group utility function.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB10 Traveler Behavior and Values. Alternate title: Individuals’ Social Preferences in Joint-Activity Choice: Role of Fairness and Asymmetric Evaluation of Costs and Rewards.

01503729

14-1223

English

18p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Activity choices; Behavior; Costs; Equity; Experiments; Leisure time; Stated preferences

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-1223

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:28PM