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Modeling purchases of new cars: an analysis of the 2014 French market

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Abstract

This paper analyzes and compares different policy scenarios as well as discusses price elasticities and willingness to pay and to accept using revealed preference (RP) data from the French new-car market in 2014 by means of a cross-nested logit (CNL) model. We focus particularly on electric and hybrid vehicles. We use interactions between the cost (both fixed and running costs) and the household income to analyze the sensitivity towards different policy scenarios per income level. Results show that the willingness to pay and to accept obtained in our study is consistent with the real-market conditions. We also find that the most effective scenario to increase the market shares of new sold electric vehicles is that of a major technological advance such as a decrease in price due to cheaper manufacturing costs and an increase in driving range, rather than a policy-based scenario. In addition, the market segment that has more potential to increase the market shares of electric vehicle purchase is the middle-income level. In the paper, we discuss how to overcome the difficulties of working with revealed preference data, and propose multiple imputations to impute the attributes of the unchosen alternatives, by drawing from their empirical distributions.

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Notes

  1. http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/automotive.

  2. These segments are derived from the European Commission’s segmentation.

  3. Here, a car is defined by a combination of make-model-type. The alternatives are car-types, as defined in Table 2.

  4. For the change in units, we consider the mean exchange rate between US$ and €  for 2014 which is 1.33$/€  according to the European Central Bank.

  5. We also try multiple imputations, but the results do not change significantly, and considering it in this way saves time in the analysis.

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Acknowledgements

This study is financed by a research agreement with Nissan International SA, which is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Transport and Mobility Laboratory, School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Anna Fernández-Antolín & Michel Bierlaire

  2. University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD), Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland

    Matthieu de Lapparent

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  1. Anna Fernández-Antolín
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  2. Matthieu de Lapparent
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  3. Michel Bierlaire
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Correspondence to Anna Fernández-Antolín.

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Fernández-Antolín, A., de Lapparent, M. & Bierlaire, M. Modeling purchases of new cars: an analysis of the 2014 French market. Theory Decis 84, 277–303 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-017-9631-y

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