Consumer Learning and Hybrid Vehicle Adoption

Giving Green to Get Green? Incentives and Consumer Adoption of Hybrid Vehicle Technology

Federal, state and local governments use a variety of incentives to induce consumer adoption of hybrid-electric vehicles. We study the relative efficacy of state sales tax waivers, income tax credits and non-tax incentives and find that the type of tax incentive offered is as important as the value of the tax incentive. Conditional on value, we find that sales tax waivers are associated a seven...

Spatial Effects on Hybrid Electric Vehicle Adoption

This paper examines spatial effects on hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) adoption. This is in contrast to most existing analyses, which concentrate on analyzing socioeconomic factors and demographics. This paper uses a general spatial model to estimate the strength of ‘neighbor effects’ on HEV adoption—namely that each consumer’s HEV-adoption decision can be influenced by the HEV-adoption decisions...

Essays on Consumer Learning and New Product Adoption

Learning Hybrid Algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problems

This paper presents a generic technique for improving hybrid algorithms through the discovery of and tuning of meta-heuristics. The idea is to represent a family of “push/pull” heuristics that are based upon inserting and removing tasks in a current solution, with an algebra. We then let a learning algorithm search for the best possible algebraic term, which represents a hybrid algorithm for a ...

Improving Hybrid Vehicle Fuel Efficiency Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Deciding what mix of engine and battery power to use is critical to hybrid vehicles’ fuel efficiency. Current solutions consider several factors such as the charge of the battery and how efficient the engine operates at a given speed. Previous research has shown that by taking into account the future power requirements of the vehicle, a more efficient balance of engine vs. battery power can be ...