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Hypothesis testing on divers' rational expectations: An experimental approach

  • Transportation Engineering
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Abstract

The driver predicts the route conditions, which have significant effects on his/her route choices, before the choices are made. The consequence of prediction is called expectations. Expectations on traffic conditions play decisive roles in ones' daily traffic behavior. In this paper, a series of in-house experiments to simulate route choice behavior in a group dynamics are made to provide us with a set of expectations data which explain how ones' expectations evolve over time through their learning processes. Though some experimental approaches to simulate the traffic behavior have proposed, few studies have addressed the statistical testing of the behavioral hypothesis underling traffic behavior modeling. In this paper, a statistical methodology is presented to test whether the rationality of drivers' expectations upon route conditions can be rejected based upon the data set generated by in-house experiments. The rationality of expectations can be statistically tested against the null hypothesis by investigating their properties of unbiasedness, orthogonality and efficiency. This paper concludes that the rational expectations hypotheses cannot be statistically rejected as far as our experiments are concerned.

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The manuscript for this paper was submitted for review on July 30, 1999.

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Do, M., Kobayashi, K. Hypothesis testing on divers' rational expectations: An experimental approach. KSCE J Civ Eng 4, 1–10 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02829170

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