Modeling social influence from a perspective of shift: an elaborated model

Abstract

This paper follows authors’ previous work, which measured social influence in travel behavior using a sequential stated adaptation experiment, and aims to investigate issues that are not discussed in the previous one. Specifically, this paper supplements the previous work in two aspects. On the one hand, the previous work tried to model respondents’ sequential choice in terms of a choice task with and without social network member’s choice, and estimated the model sequentially without any clear evidences to show the difference between sequential and simultaneous estimation. On the other hand, the previous work did not clearly address two specific issues that come with the use of sequential choice experiments (i.e., choice consistency and similarity). The results of this study reveal that estimating the model simultaneously may lead to confounding bias and that taking the issues caused by the sequential choice experiment could provide more insights about social influence.

KEYWORDS:

• Social influence
• sequential & simultaneous estimation
• sequential stated adaptation experiment
• choice consistency
• similarity

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which help to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Xiaofeng Pan: Conceptualization, Data Collection, Model Estimation and Manuscript Writing; Soora Rasouli: Conceptualization, Data Collection, Manuscript Editing; Harry Timmermans: Conceptualization, Data Collection, Manuscript Editing.