On October 26, 2022, Engineering Department, in collaboration with CITIES, organized a seminar talk presented by Elisabetta Cherchi, Newcastle University.
Abstract:
Innovative systems such as Automated Taxis (AT) are not currently available in the market, and consumers have not experienced them. This represents a major problem when estimating willingness to pay (WTP) for ATs because consumers have no preferences for products that they do not know and have never used. Even though ATs have been tested and deployed in a relatively small scale around the world, as an emerging and highly innovative new mode of transport, are still in the trial stage and related taxi services are not available to most of the public at the current stage. Since consumer preferences are formed by experiencing the product, an important research question is to which extent knowledge and experience (direct and indirect) shape consumers’ preferences and consequently the WTP for the new products. The literature on this topic is very limited and mostly applied to the case of electric vehicles (EV).
In this seminar, I will discuss the extent to which WTP for AT is affected by different levels of knowledge and experience. These include the impact of simple information about the AT, information from someone who has directly used AT, the experience of AT operating in a city using a virtual reality environment, the experience of living in a city where ATs are currently operating and finally experience of direct use of an AT in reality. Data collected in major cities in China where ATs are in operation, and some other major cities where ATs are not operating, are used to estimate the impact of having used an AT and the impact of living in a city where ATs are operating and available for the public. Data collected in the UK, using an immersive virtual reality environment and online, are used to estimate the impact of having an immersive virtual experience of AT operating in a city. Levels of knowledge of and information about AT have been collected in all datasets and their impact on WTP for AT and its characteristics were estimated and compared across samples.
Bio:
Elisabetta Cherchi is a Professor at the School of Engineering, Future Mobility Group, Newcastle University and an Adjunct Professor, the School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, China. She is Editor in Chief of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice and past Associate Editor of Transportation. She is the past Chair of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research (IATBR), as well as past Secretary and Treasurer of the IATBR. She is a member of the ADB10 TRB committee on Travel Behavior and Value and a past member of the ADB40 TRB committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting and ADB50 on Transportation Planning Applications. She is a member of the Advisory Team of the Italian Ministry of Transport for the decarbonisation roadmap. Her research interest is in data collection, demand modelling, the behavioural background of how individuals take decisions and exploring new ways to elicit and model the complexity of individual behaviour, especially for emerging problems such as understanding what drives sustainable transport behaviour and how it can be promoted.