The effects of risk preferences on consumers' reference-dependent choices for autonomous vehicles

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping mobility through autonomous vehicles (AVs), which may introduce risks such as technical malfunctions, cybersecurity threats, and ethical dilemmas in decision-making. Despite these complexities, the influence of consumers' risk preferences on AV acceptance remains poorly understood. This study explores how individuals' risk preferences affect their choices among private AVs (PAVs), shared AVs (SAVs), and private conventional vehicles (PCVs). Employing a lottery experiment and a self-reported survey, we first derive four parameters to capture individuals' risk preferences. Based on a stated preference experiment and the error component logit model, we analyze reference-dependent preferences for key attributes of PAVs and SAVs, using PCVs as the reference. Our analysis reveals that risk-tolerant consumers are more inclined toward PAVs or SAVs. Further, consumers exhibit a greater sensitivity to losses, such as higher purchasing prices and running costs, than to gains, such as reduced egress time. Specifically, for buying a PAV, consumers are willing to pay 3582 CNY more for 1000 CNY saving on annual running cost, 3470 CNY for a 1-min reduction in egress time, 28,880 CNY for removing driver liability for crashes, and 30,710 CNY for the improved privacy data security. For adopting SAVs, consumers are willing to pay 0.096 CNY extra per kilometer for a 1-min reduction in access time and 0.033 CNY extra per kilometer for a 1% increase in SAV availability. Therefore, this study enhances the understanding on risk preferences in AV acceptance and offers important implications for stakeholders in the AI-empowered mobility context.