I CAN’T BELIEVE YOUR ATTITUDE: ELICITING ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS VIA BEST-WORST SCALING AND JOINTLY ESTIMATING THEIR IMPACT ON ELECTRIC VEHICLE CHOICE

摘要

The number of conventionally fuelled motor vehicles in use is increasing worldwide despite warnings about thefinite fossil fuel and the detrimental impacts of burning such fuels. While electric vehicles, the subject of muchresearch, generate far less emissions and offer the potential for power from renewable sources, they are yet tosignificantly penetrate the market. Tangible barriers such as price and vehicle range still exist, but consumerattitudes also drive behaviour. This paper examines attributes in a framework relatively new to transportation,best-worst scaling. This is widely considered an improvement over traditional methods of eliciting attitudes andbeliefs, where respondents select attitudes they find best or worst from a set of attitudinal statements. To avoidpotential endogeneity bias we jointly model attitudes and choice for the first time with best-worst data. We findthat energy crisis, air quality and climate change concerns influence behaviour with respect to vehicle range.Agreeing that travel behaviour change and forms of government incentives are needed influences behaviourwith respect to vehicle emissions. We argue that correctly modelling attitudes reduces the error term of thevehicle choice model and provides policy makers with an improved lens for assessing behaviour.