Effects of total cost of ownership on automobile purchasing decisions

Abstract

In this paper, we reveal a complete picture of ownership-related expenses and construct a decision model which helps decision maker to make the best choice when purchasing an automobile. The decision model helps the customers to understand what a car will cost beyond its purchase price when customers consider out-of-pocket expenses like fuel, repair, and insurance. Moreover, decision maker's preferences need to be elicited thowever, elicitation of these preferences is difficult when preferential dependencies exist or possible number of uncertainties is high. Therefore, we approximate representative joint probability distributions of a decision maker with partial information. We use a database of sedan models of all automobile brands and run a simulation to analyze the total cost of ownership of driving a car for 5 years. We found that even more expensive car could save more money over the first 5 years of ownership.