A decision-making rule for modeling travelers’ route choice behavior based on cumulative prospect theory

To make practical use of research into travelers’ behavior in route choice modeling, a link is required to connect objective travel scenarios with the subjective decisions made by travelers. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) offers an alternative framework of route choice behavior that goes beyond the conventional expected utility theory (EUT) models. This paper develops a general travel decision-making rule utilizing CPT. It investigates the mechanism of travelers’ behavior, examines the probability of applying CPT as a measure of commute utility, and establishes a general utility measurement system, the results of which are found to be more consistent with the experimental data than those of EUT-based route choice models. In addition, an approach to confirm the reference point value is suggested. The main techniques adopted in this study are demonstration analysis, a questionnaire survey, and statistical approaches.