Conducting Stated Choice Experiments within an Immersive Virtual Reality Environment: An Application to the Discrete Choice of Automated versus Normal Taxi

This paper describes the methodology set up to measure consumers' preferences in a choice between a fully automated and normal taxi, using a Stated Choice (SC) experiment embedded in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment. VR represents an important tool to allow respondents to "live" their choice with the potential to reduce the typical problem of lack of realism in SC experiments. This paper describes the work done to build the VR-based SC experiment, and discusses challenges and potentialities. The study is applied to the choice of taxi in the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK.