Modeling joint eating-out destination choices incorporating group-level impedance: A case study of the Greater Tokyo Area

TL;DR

This paper develops a model for joint eating-out destination choices that explicitly incorporates group-level travel impedance, demonstrating significant improvements in predictive performance over ego-level models in the Greater Tokyo Area.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint choice model that accounts for group-level travel impedance, highlighting its importance in accurately modeling social activity participation.

Findings

Group-level travel times have higher elasticities than individual travel times.

Incorporating group-level impedance improves model performance by up to 49%.

Travel time significantly influences destination choice, especially at the group level.

Abstract

Individuals undertake both solo and joint activities as part of their overall activity-travel patterns. Compared to work and maintenance activities, social and leisure activities differ in that they exhibit high levels of temporal and spatial flexibility. In this study we used data from an ego-centric social networks survey in the Greater Tokyo Area and follow-up group activity survey to estimate a joint eating-out destination choice model explicitly incorporating group-level impedance. Consistent with the literature, travel time has a large impact on destination choice as measured by its elasticity; however, the elasticities of group-level maximum, average and median travel times are larger than individual-level travel times. Furthermore, we show that incorporating group-level impedance increases model performance up to 49% against the ego-level impedance model, a substantial increase that underscores the need to incorporate group-level characteristics in travel behavior models.