The SWE colloquium on Thursday 12 November (12:00-13:00) will be presented by Thomas Hancock, Research Fellow in the Institute for Transport at the University of Leeds. The talk will be totally virtual, streamed live through Zoom.

Decision Field Theory for choices in real-world settings

Psychologists and economists have separately constructed many different choice models that are used to understand and predict the choices we make in a wide variety of contexts. Thus far, these models have been used to pursue different research agendas, with economists typically interested in forecasting future choices and psychologists focusing on understanding the decision-making process in of itself. In our work, we look at bridging the gap by improving the underlying mechanics of Decision Field Theory, a model developed by psychologists, such that it can “step out of the laboratory” to perform in the real-world settings that are typically studied by economists.  We then show how our updated version of DFT can be implemented in a number of case studies including transport mode choice for trips to London and driving behaviour problems such as modelling the choice of when to merge lanes onto a motorway.