This paper presents a systematic way of understanding and modelling traveler behavior in response to on-demand mobility services. We explicitly consider the sequential and yet interconnected decision-making stages specific to on-demand service usage. The framework includes a hybrid choice model for service subscription, and three logit mixture models with interconsumer heterogeneity for the service access, menu product choice and opt-out choice. Different models are connected by feeding logsums. The proposed modelling framework is essential for accounting the impacts of real-time on-demand system's dynamics on traveler behaviors and capturing consumer heterogeneity, thus being greatly relevant for integrations in multi-modal dynamic simulators. The methodology is applied to a case study of an innovative personalized on-demand real-time system which incentivizes travelers to select more sustainable travel options. The data for model estimation is collected through a smartphone-based contextaware stated preference survey. Through model estimation, lower VOTs are observed when the respondents opt to use the reward system. The perception of incentives and schedule delay by different population segments are quantified. The obtained results are fundamental in setting the ground for different behavioral scenarios of such a new on-demand system. The proposed methodology is flexible to be applied to model other on-demand mobility services such as ridehailing services and the emerging MaaS (Mobility as a service).
Estimating discrete choice models on panel data allows for the estimation of preference heterogeneity in the sample. While the Logit Mixture model with random parameters is mostly used to account for variation across individuals, preferences may also vary across different choice situations of the same individual. Up to this point, Logit Mixtures incorporating both inter-and intra-consumer heterogeneity are estimated with the classical Maximum Simulated Likelihood (MSL) procedure. The MSL procedure becomes computationally expensive with an increasing sample size and can be burdensome in the presence of a multi-modal likelihood function. We therefore propose a Hierarchical Bayes estimator for Logit Mixtures with both levels of heterogeneity. It builds on the Allenby-Train procedure, which considers only interconsumer heterogeneity. To test the proposed procedures, we analyze how well the true patterns of heterogeneity are recovered in a simulation environment. Results from the Monte Carlo simulation suggest that falsely ignoring intra-consumer heterogeneity despite its presence in the data leads to biased estimates and a decreased goodness of fit. The latter is confirmed by a real-world example of explaining mode choices for GPS traces. We further show that the runtime of the proposed estimator is substantially faster than for the corresponding MSL estimator.
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