Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	711
Event Title:	Innovations in Activity and Travel Behavior
Event Date:	Jan 25 2012 8:30AM- 10:15AM
Event Location:	Hilton, International Center
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

I'll Take the Money and You Can Have the Short Commute: Study of Household-Level Work and Travel Decisions (12-3394)

With many real world decisions being made in conjunction with other decision makers, or single agent decisions having an influence on other members of the decision maker's immediate entourage, there is strong interest in studying the relative weight assigned to different agents in such contexts. In the present paper, we focus on the case of one member of a two person household being asked to make choices affecting the travel time and salary of both members. We highlight the presence of significant heterogeneity across individuals not just in their underlying sensitivities, but also in the relative weight they assign to their partner. Interestingly, we find that male respondents place more weight on their partner's travel time, while female respondents place more weight on their partner's salary. From a modelling perspective, we show clear evidence of a risk of confounding between heterogeneity in marginal sensitivities and heterogeneity in the weights assigned to each member. We show how this can lead to misleading model results, and argue that this may also explain results showing bargaining or weight parameters outside the usual[0,1] range in more traditional joint decision making contexts.

Authors
     O'Neill, Vikki , Queens University, United Kingdom
     Hess, Stephane , University of Leeds, United Kingdom
     Campbell, Danny , Queens University, United Kingdom