Evaluating Rules for Aggregating Satisfaction with Activity-travel Episodes to a Day-level Satisfaction Measure

Abstract

The recent interest in developing subjective wellbeing aggregation rules in transport research has triggered dialogue across disciplines. Here we analyze how 10 different aggregation rules result in different day-level indicators of satisfaction based on separate measures for each activity and trip on the day and compare the resulting distribution of day-level scores with those for life satisfaction. We find that the normative rules outperform the heuristic rules and are best used to create day-level indicators of satisfaction with activities and trips if the aim is to mimic the statistical distribution for life satisfaction scores.