Modelling travellers’ risky choice in a revealed preference context: a comparison of EUT and non-EUT approaches

Recent work on risky choice modelling has sought to address the shortcomings of expected utility theory (EUT) by using non-expected utility theoretic (non-EUT) approaches. However, to date these approaches have been merely tested on stated choice data which is flexible and cheap. In this study, we empirically investigate the feasibility and validity of non-EUT approaches in a revealed preference (RP) context in which travel time distribution is extracted from observed historical travel time data, and subsequently present systematic comparisons between EUT, weighted utility theory, rank-dependent expected utility theory, and prospect theory (PT). The empirical evidence indicates that each non-EUT model has important behavioural insights to offer, moreover, EUT as well as non-EUT models can be applied to the RP context. However, the EUT and non-EUT model fits are generally similar with only PT providing a marginally improved model fit over EUT. The key findings presented in this study reinforce the importance of exploring non-EUT models within a revealed preference context before they can be applied reliably to modelling risky choices in the real world.