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

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 a follow-up group activity survey to estimate a joint eating-out destination choice model explicitly incorporating group-level impedance. We tested four different measures of group-level travel time (maximum travel time, minimum travel time, group average travel time and group median travel time) and evaluated their performance against a model using only ego travel time. Estimation results show that models incorporating centrality measures of group impedance generally outperform ego-only models, with the best performing travel time measure being group average travel time. The best performing model increased model performance against the ego-model up to 32.2% in terms of fitting factor, a substantial increase that underscores the need to incorporate group-level characteristics in travel behavior models.

Automated summary

Individuals engage in both solo and joint activities as part of their overall activity-travel patterns. Social and leisure activities, compared to work and maintenance activities, are more flexible in terms of time and space. This study demonstrates that incorporating group-level impedance measures can improve the performance of travel behavior models, with group average travel time being the best performing measure.