Travel decision making under uncertainty and road traffic behavior: The multifold role of ambiguity attitude

Jingjing Zeng, Zheng Li and David A. Hensher

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2025, vol. 192, issue C

Abstract: To connect commuters’ uncertain mode choices with traffic behavior in the presence of travel time variability, we develop a dynamic traffic simulation in terms of an agent-based model, which consists of two sub-models, the mode choice model and the traffic flow simulation model. The modeling framework accommodates the interplay between mode choice and traffic behaviors and their co-evolution over time. We embed an extended list of empirical parameters including ambiguity/risk attitudes and time-money trade-offs within a rank-dependent and mode-dependent utility framework to imitate commuters’ daily mode choice behaviors. The improved behavioral realism at the micro-level results in more realistic outputs such as modal split and average speed at equilibrium. The evidence demonstrates that a richer representation of mode choice behavior at the individual level is associated with a gain in aggregating them to the level of system behavior, in which ambiguity seeking, a typical behavior in the loss domain but largely ignored in the transport literature, plays an important role.

Keywords: Decision making under uncertainty; Ambiguity attitude; Traffic flow; Agent-based modeling; Travel time variability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2024.104326

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