Person, place, or preference? Combining subjective and objective decision agency with choice preferences predicts behavior during major shifts in human mobility

Human mobility plays a crucial role in shaping outcomes such as disease transmission dynamics, economic trends, and access to critical services. In this study, we explored the interplay between decision preferences, public health policy, and mobility patterns during a recent, near-universal shift in human behavior: the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. We surveyed N = 1049 residents capturing three key decision-making preferences: temporal discounting, loss aversion, and agency. In tandem, population mobility in 2020 was measured for six different “place” categories (grocery stores/pharmacies, general retail, arts/entertainment, restaurants/bars, education, healthcare) using mobile phone-derived foot-traffic data.

The results indicate that decision agency and choice preferences were significantly correlated with zip code-level per capita visits to different places, accounting for disease spread, policy stringency, and socioeconomic variables. We further assessed the predictive power of the scores via out-of-sample predictions using Random Forest models. The results underscore the importance of capturing these behavioral mechanisms in public health intervention strategies and policy.