Behavioural economics and its implications for transport

Abstract

Increasing attention is being paid to behavioural economics in the social sciences and in public policy. We attempt to gather up the effects based on previous reviews of the literature and show the implications for transport and energy consumption. We show that there are several behavioural aspects of incentives on individual behaviour. We also show that there are a number of contextual factors on individual behaviour, such as messengers, norms, defaults, salience, priming, affect, commitment, and ego. We show the implications of this research for experimentation, and the measurement of wellbeing. In particular, we argue that transport research should use field experiments to carefully demonstrate causality in the evaluation of interventions. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.