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“If only I had taken the other road...”: Regret, risk and reinforced learning in informed route-choice

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“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;”

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the effect of regret on route choice behavior when both descriptional information and experiential feedback on choice outcomes are provided. The relevance of Regret Theory in travel behavior has been well demonstrated in non-repeated choice environments involving decisions on the basis of descriptional information. The relation between regret and reinforced learning through experiential feedbacks is less understood. Using data obtained from a simple route-choice experiment involving different levels of travel time variability, discrete-choice models accounting for regret aversion effects are estimated. The results suggest that regret aversion is more evident when descriptional information is provided ex-ante compared to a pure learning from experience condition. Yet, the source of regret is related more strongly to experiential feedbacks rather than to the descriptional information itself. Payoff variability is negatively associated with regret. Regret aversion is more observable in choice situations that reveal risk-seeking, and less in the case of risk-aversion. These results are important for predicting the possible behavioral impacts of emerging information and communication technologies and intelligent transportation systems on travelers’ behavior.

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Acknowledgments

The comments and suggestions of three anonymous referees are very much appreciated. We would also like to thank warmly the editor Martin Richards for the professional support and advice which helped us to significantly improve on the original paper. Special thanks to IT specialist Andrew Hart from UWE for the dedicated hardware and software support. Preliminary results of this work have been presented and discussed in the 7th Discrete Choice Modeling Workshop organized by the Transport and Mobility Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland in 2011.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Transport and Society, Department of Planning and Architecture, Faculty of Environment and Technology, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Eran Ben-Elia

  2. Department of Transportation Engineering and Geo-information, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, Technion, Israel

    Robert Ishaq & Yoram Shiftan

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  1. Eran Ben-Elia
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  2. Robert Ishaq
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  3. Yoram Shiftan
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Correspondence to Eran Ben-Elia.

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Ben-Elia, E., Ishaq, R. & Shiftan, Y. “If only I had taken the other road...”: Regret, risk and reinforced learning in informed route-choice. Transportation 40, 269–293 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-012-9426-5

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