How individuals mentally represent a decision problem when making a choice among possible courses of actions in a given situational setting is an area about which only relatively little is known to date. Many choices, such as travel or location choices be it for the short term (e.g., mode and destination of a trip) or longer term (e.g., transport mode availability, residential location) tend to be complex. They require simultaneous decisions on multiple dimensions and involve choice sets that have very many options and with outcomes that are hard to predict. Though there is ample evidence that individuals make such decisions based on mental representations that involve a strong reduction of reality, the way a decision-maker selects attributes and perceives benefits is not so well understood. Yet, this selection in the mental representation will have a strong potential effect on how choice alternatives are evaluated and, hence, on choice outcomes. To date, econometric approaches have conceptualized and modeled heterogeneity in decision strategies in terms of taste variety, predominantly in mixed-logit and latent class frameworks. However, the construction of a mental representation, which may vary across persons and situations, also affects the structure of evaluation functions and choice sets and may differ between individuals. The way decision makers construct reality, therefore, is an emerging field of research in behavioral decision making that we address in this  workshop.

The purpose of the workshop is to review the state-of-the-art in the field and -through interactive discussions- to identify avenues for future research bridging findings in different streams of research. The ambition is to formulate research approaches that go beyond traditional qualitative focus-groups and in-depth interviews that uncover key attributes for stated choice experiments and revealed discrete choice modeling. Questions addressed include: How can mental representations of decision problems be conceptualized, modeled and measured? To what extent and in what ways do revealed mental representations of travelers and consumers vary across situational contexts and person characteristics? What is the influence of the mental constructions of decision problems on choice behavior and what are the implications for and prospective of incorporating this in discrete choice models?