Study on departure time choice behavior in commute problem with stochastic bottleneck capacity: Experiments and modeling

Abstract: Uncertainty is inevitable in transportation system due to the stochastic change of demand and supply. It is one of the most important factors affecting travelers' choice behavior. Based on the framework of Vickrey's bottleneck model, we designed and conducted laboratory experiment to investigate the effects of stochastic bottleneck capacity on commuter departure time choice behavior. Two different scenarios with different information feedback are investigated. The experimental results show that the relationship between the mean cost (E(C)) and the standard deviation of cost (\sigma) can all be fitted approximately linearly with a positive slope \sigma=E(C)/\lambda^*-m (\lambda^*>0). This suggests that under the uncertain environment, travelers are likely to minimize their travel cost budget, defined as E(C)-\lambda^* \sigma, and \lambda^*>0 indicates that the travelers behave risk preferring. The experiments also found that providing the cost information of all departure times to the commuters lowered the commuters' risk preference coefficient (i.e., \lambda^* decreases). We propose a reinforcement learning model, which is shown to reproduce the main experimental findings well.