Using fuzzy measures and habitual domains to analyze the public attitude and apply to the gas taxi policy

Abstract

Public acceptance and support are the crucial keys for implementing public policies successfully. Thus, the understanding of public acceptance or rejection towards the policy, as well as the important attributes of concern, could be very helpful to implementing the policy. However, most conventional attitude models could not approximate people's subjective evaluation process exactly by virtue of the additivity and independence assumptions. Additionally, people's decision behavior is deeply affected by their existing habits. Since habitual domains exist in the decision process, if the government can change or extend people's habitual thinking in favor of the public policy, the policy will receive satisfactory acceptance. Therefore, this study uses the habitual domain theory to analyze the public's attitude towards public policies. Furthermore, general fuzzy measures and fuzzy integrals, which require only boundary conditions and monotonicity, are also applied to develop a public attitude analysis model. An empirical study on the compress natural gas (CNG) taxi policy in Taipei City is conducted to show the applicability of the proposed model. The empirical results indicate that there are significant differences between the public's concern and governmental publicity, and some valuable strategies are suggested to the government. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.