An interactive city choice model and its application for measuring the intercity interaction

Measuring the interaction between cities is an important research topic in many disciplines, such
as sociology, geography, economics and transportation science. The traditional and most widely
used spatial interaction model is the gravity model, but it requires the parameters to be artificially
set. In this paper, we propose a parameter-free interactive city choice (ICC) model that measures
intercity interaction from the perspective of individual choice behavior. The ICC model assumes
that the probability of an individual choosing to interact with a city is proportional to the number
of opportunities in the destination city and inversely proportional to the number of intervening
opportunities between the origin city and the destination city, calculated using the travel time in
the transportation network. The intercity interaction intensity can be obtained by calculating the
product of this probability and the origin city’s population. We apply the ICC model to measure the
interaction intensity among 339 cities in China and analyze the impact of changes in the Chinese land
transportation network from 2005 to 2018 on the intercity and city interaction intensity. Compared
with the previously widely used spatial interaction models, the measurement results of the ICC
model are more consistent with the actual situation.