A Route Choice Experiment Involving Monetary Payouts and Actual Waiting Times
Date
2006-08
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Abstract
This paper studies the response of subjects to monetary and direct time costs in an
experimental setting using a Pigou-Knight-Downs framework in which subjects choose
between a short direct route that becomes increasingly congested as more people travel
on it and a more indirect route that does not become congested. This experimental design
yields three important new insights. First, some subjects prefer monetary costs, while
others prefer time costs. Second, the introduction of subject heterogeneity results in
different value of time preferences between subject groups. Finally, there is evidence
that subjects from lower socioeconomic families who are currently employed while
school (the subject pool is almost entirely comprised of UCSB students) travel the
congested route more often when actual waiting time is involved.
Description
Keywords
Transportation
Citation
Transportation Conference, Banff, Alberta, CANADA 2006