I Can’t Believe Your Attitude: Eliciting Attitudes and Beliefs Through Best-Worst Scaling and Jointly Estimating Their Impact on Electric Vehicle Choice

The number of conventionally fueled motor vehicles in use is increasing worldwide despite warnings about the finite fossil fuel and the detrimental impacts of burning such fuels. While electric vehicles, the subject of much research, generate far less emissions and offer the potential for power from renewable sources, they are yet to significantly penetrate the market. Tangible barriers such as price and vehicle range still exist, but consumer attitudes also drive behavior. This paper examines attributes in a framework relatively new to transportation, best-worst scaling. This is widely considered an improvement over traditional methods of eliciting attitudes and beliefs, where respondents select attitudes they find best or worst from a set of attitudinal statements. To avoid potential endogeneity bias the authors jointly model attitudes and choice for the first time with best-worst data. They find that energy crisis, air quality and climate change concerns influence behavior with respect to vehicle range. Agreeing that travel behavior change and forms of government incentives are needed influences behavior with respect to vehicle emissions. The authors argue that correctly modeling attitudes reduces the error term of the vehicle choice model and provides policy makers with an improved lens for assessing behavior.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABJ40 Travel Survey Methods.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Beck, Matthew J
  • Rose, John M
  • Greaves, Stephen P
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Attitudes; Choice models; Consumer behavior; Electric vehicles; Travel surveys
• Subject Areas: Energy; Highways; Vehicles and Equipment; I15: Environment; I90: Vehicles;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01506263
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-5680
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 30 2014 1:53PM