Choosing Information Sources: A Modeling Framework

Abstract

This paper proposes the modelling framework developed to study the travellers’ choice of information sources and their subsequent travel mode choice decisions. The motivation behind this research is to investigate the factors that people consider in selecting different sources of information in today’s information rich atmosphere of travel. The goal of this study is to develop a comprehensive choice model that can capture the information acquisition process by predicting the choice of information sources together with its effects on travel choices of the travellers. Information acquisition process for the travel decisions is considered especially when a user first decides to acquire the information and is not satisfied with his present level of knowledge/belief. It is important to explicitly model the abstract terms involved in the whole process of information acquisition and subsequent travel decisions. The developed modelling framework, based on the complicated decision making process, is expected to cope with it. Utility function is formulated in the Nested Logit Model framework