Accommodating the heterogeneity in traveller’s responsiveness in Safe Route choice experiment – Study from India

Abstract

Developing countries like India lacks research works to examine how the heterogeneity in responsiveness affect the outcome of a stated choice experiment. This study is an attempt to observe the effects of variation in the responsiveness of a person to different levels of parameters in the selection of a safer route in a country like India. This paper applies a Mixed Logit (ML) model to analyze the safer route choices done by the two-wheeler road users. This model is extended to account for the heterogeneity and explain its impact on the willingness to pay (WTP) for accident reduction. The empirical study shows that if the heterogeneity across individuals are not accounted adequately it leads to a statistically inferior data fit and also to inappropriate evaluations. The calculated WTP values suggest that these values are sensitive to preference heterogeneity and are underestimated if an assumption of preference homogeneity is made.