A Microeconomic Interpretation of the Maximum Entropy Estimator of Multinomial Logit Models and Its Equivalence to the Maximum Likelihood Estimator

Abstract: Maximum entropy models are often used to describe supply and demand behavior in urban transportation and land use systems. However, they have been criticized for not representing behavioral rules of system agents and because their parameters seems to adjust only to modeler-imposed constraints. In response, it is demonstrated that the solution to the entropy maximization problem with linear constraints is a multinomial logit model whose parameters solve the likelihood maximization problem of this probabilistic model. But this result neither provides a microeconomic interpretation of the entropy maximization problem nor explains the equivalence of these two optimization problems. This work demonstrates that an analysis of the dual of the entropy maximization problem yields two useful alternative explanations of its solution. The first shows that the maximum entropy estimators of the multinomial logit model parameters reproduce rational user behavior, while the second shows that the likelihood maximization problem for multinomial logit models is the dual of the entropy maximization problem.