Traveler compliance with advice: a Bayesian utilitarian perspective

This paper presents a formal model of traveler compliance with different types of advice (or guidance, prescriptive information) based on the premises of Bayesian expected utility decision-making. The developed model explains a traveler’s propensity to comply with received advice in terms of the interaction between his preferences for different travel alternatives, relative importance attached to travel times, perceived travel time uncertainty and perceived unreliability of the information. Following the presentation of the model, we illustrate its workings by means of numerical simulations.