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THE PENETRATION OF ENGINEERING BY ECONOMICS: McFADDEN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROAD DEMAND ESTIMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2021

Ariane Dupont-Kieffer ,
Sylvie Rivot  and
Jean-Loup Madre
Ariane Dupont-Kieffer*
Affiliation:
Ariane Dupont-Kieffer: PHARE/University Panthéon-Sorbonne, [email protected];
Sylvie Rivot
Affiliation:
Sylvie Rivot: BETA/Université of Haute-Alsace, [email protected];
Jean-Loup Madre
Affiliation:
Jean-Loup Madre: UPE/IFSTTAR/AME/DEST, [email protected].
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.

Type
Symposium: Economics and its Boundaries
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 262 - 278
Copyright
© The History of Economics Society, 2021

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Footnotes

This paper was first presented at the Charles Gide 2019 workshop “Evolutions of the Disciplinary Boundaries of Economics with the Other Sciences,” Montreal (QC, Canada), 25–27 June. It was partly based on a paper presented at the HOPE Conference “Becoming Applied: The Transformation of Economics,” April 2016. We would like to thank the participants of both conferences and especially Marcel Boumans. We would also to thank Julien Dupont, Emmanuelle Kalfon, and Ms Anne Le Bihan of the L’Écume bookshop of Groix.

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