• Temporal stability and reliability influence route choice probability via mental utility values in decision-making. • Study verifies the link between mental utility values and temporal path stability. • A route evacuation choice based on mental accounting utility values is proposed. • Risk-seekers prioritize speed over other factors, maintaining high expectations for time gains. • Transaction utility weights drive evacuees to prioritize reference outcomes of temporal parameters. The increasing number of natural disasters has heightened the need for evacuation. During evacuation, route choices of evacuates are affected by the road condition and evacuees’ reference-dependent evaluations. Most existing emergency evacuation models emphasize resource allocation without considering evacuees’ subjective perception of route choice. In this study, a decision-making framework for emergency evacuation route choice based on Mental Accounting Theory (MAT) is developed. The model represents actual travel time uncertainty, perception errors, and government-provided guidance as stochastic travel-time signals, and maps the MAT stages (classification/editing, mental budgeting, and assessment) into a unified mental-accounting utility that captures temporal stability and reliability. Numerical experiments on a test network illustrate that incorporating mental accounting significantly changes route preferences: evacuees become more sensitive to temporal stability and reliability, and transaction utility makes the discrepancy between perceived and guided travel times a salient driver of choice. The proposed framework offers a behaviorally interpretable alternative to traditional utility-maximizing evacuation models and can support the design of evacuation guidance policies under uncertainty.
Yang et al. (Sun,) studied this question.