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Empirical Analysis of Hypothetical Bias in Stated-Preference Experiments

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Green Intelligent Transportation Systems (GITSS 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 419))

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Abstract

The stated-preference (SP) survey is widely used to obtain data of choice prediction, especially for new transport service systems. However, the hypothetical nature of SP experiment determines that it is usually taken under a ‘what-if’ situation. The difference between the ‘stated’ and ‘real’ responses is named as the hypothetical bias (HB), which may further lead to great errors of the following model analysis. While HB has been largely confirmed in the area of economics, few studies have proved the existence of HB in transportation planning, not to mention measuring it. This paper presents a new viewpoint to study HB problem in terms of the mode split prediction. An SP survey and a revealed-preference (RP) survey were conducted before and after the opening of a new metro line in Chengdu, China. To reduce requirements on high accurate sampling, a selection–calibration–simulation method is proposed to transfer the individual choice to aggregate market share of alternatives. The multinomial logit (MNL) is selected as the basic model structure in this paper. By calibrating two separate MNL models using SP and RP data, we ran the simulation under a uniform input. The result presents the valid evidence on HB’s existence and also indicates the possible direction of deviating it. Furthermore, an improved value of time (VOT) model that can accommodate multiple time and cost variables is proposed. The calculation results of VOT confirm the simulation result and demonstrate how large HB is.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by 2015 Natural Science Key Foundation of Xihua University (No. Z1520315), the Open Research Subject of Key Laboratory of Vehicle Measurement, Control and Safety, Xihua University (No. szjj2016-014), Chengdu Science and Technology Project (No. 2015-RK00-00227-ZF), Research and Development Center of Traffic Strategy and Regional Development, Sichuan Province Social Science Research Base (No. W16203254).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Automobile and Transportation, Xihua University, Chengdu, 610039, China

    Li Tang

  2. Jiangsu Province Collaborative Innovation Center, Modern Urban Traffic Technologies, SiPaiLou Number 2, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Li Tang & Xia Luo

  3. School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, 610031, China

    Xia Luo

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  1. Li Tang
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  2. Xia Luo
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Correspondence to Li Tang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Wuhong Wang

  2. Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Klaus Bengler

  3. Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Xiaobei Jiang

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Tang, L., Luo, X. (2018). Empirical Analysis of Hypothetical Bias in Stated-Preference Experiments. In: Wang, W., Bengler, K., Jiang, X. (eds) Green Intelligent Transportation Systems. GITSS 2016. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 419. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3551-7_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3551-7_36

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-3550-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-3551-7

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