Heterogeneity in willingness to pay, trust, hedonic motivation and social conformity towards Automated Taxis: A comparative study between the UK and China

This paper presents a study on cross-national heterogeneity between the UK and China in the preferences for Automated Taxis (ATs) and its determinants. A stated choice survey (including level of service, in-vehicle features and social conformity attributes) and a set of psychological statements (to measure trust, hedonic motivation and injunctive norms) were designed and distributed in both countries. Hybrid choice models were estimated to jointly quantify the effects of both objective and psychological factors after controlling for scale. Results confirm strong heterogeneity between the UK and China in the preference for AT and its determinants, also after controlling for differences in individual-related characteristics. Other than travel time and cost, our results confirm the importance of waiting time also in the choice of AT and show the importance of new elements such as in-vehicle features, customer reviews and to less extent the number of customers. Significant heterogeneity is found between the UK and China in all these elements with the exception of in-vehicle features. Among the three latent variables analysed, trust emerges as the most significantly different. The impact of trust in the UK is four times higher than in China, whereas the impact of hedonic motivation is roughly twice as large and the impact of injunctive norms is the same. The marginal rate of substitution suggests that policies aiming at targeting latent constructs might be more effective in the UK than in China.