Understanding Transportation Systems Through the Lenses of Experimental Economics: A Review

Abstract

Planning, operation and analysis of transportation systems hinge on theories and assumptions regarding individual choices, traffic flows, and traffic equilibria. Transportation field data collection, however, often lacks sufficient control, and therefore is often not suitable to test theories in transport modelling and their underlying behavioural axioms. With increased pressure on transport planners to deliver efficient, safe and publicly acceptable plans, it is imperative for transport scientists to find alternatives when testing the behavioural axioms that underpin current theories. Transportation scientists have, in response, increasingly used methods from experimental economics to gain insights into behaviour as well as to test theories and policies. Here we review and critically analyse the use of the experimental method in transportation science. Specifically, we synthesize the findings of experimental studies with regard to safety, freight, route choice, departure time choice, and location choice. We also reflect on well-known traffic paradoxes. We find that some of the evidence for traffic paradoxes can be attributed to experimental artefacts and that experimental studies when conducted by engineers tend to lack dominance and when conducted by economists tend to lack salience. Dominance and salience are key precepts of the external validity of studies drawing on methods from experimental economics. This review work also highlights methods that strengthen dominance and salience when using experimental economics in transportation studies.