کالاهای جستجو شده و آزموده شده درون فروشگاهی یا خرید آنلاین In-store or online shopping of search and experience goods: A hybrid choice approach

1. Introduction Information and communication technologies (ICT) have experienced a persistent increase in usage over the last decades, which, in the context of online shopping, allow for a more flexible spatial and temporal accomplishment of shopping activities (Mokhtarian, 2004). A shift from traditional store towards online shopping has been ongoing for some time, and has become more and more important in terms of market shares and individual behavior, as discussd in Rudolph et al. (2015) for the case of Switzerland. Regarding the interdependencies with travel behavior, Mokhtarian et al. (2006) argue that apart from expanding individuals’ choice sets, the potential effects of ICT are ambiguous and require further empirical investigations (see also e.g. Salomon (1986), Farag et al. (2007) and Cao (2009), for extended literature reviews on the topic). But what are the key attributes in individual decision making for either visiting a store or shopping online? How do people value travel, delivery and shopping/ordering time when directly facing the trade-offs between these two alternative shopping channels? Is there a difference between product categories, and how do socio-economic characteristics and soft factors, such as attitudes towards shopping and ICT related aspects, affect these trade-offs? The data analyzed in this paper was collected as part of a project1 investigating how a world with restricted car ownership would affect choice, travel and scheduling behavior. Importantly, the absence of private cars was justified to the respondents by car-reducing policy developments, suggested by an increased public support of carpooling and free-floating car sharing systems, leaving public transportation as the only traditional reference mode for longer distances. The main objective of the project is to investigate how today’s people behave in a possible future situation where private cars were no longer part of their daily travel (Schmid and Axhausen, 2015; Schmid et al., 2016). In the context of shopping, the main motivation is to explore how under such conditions, the choice behavior between in-store and online shopping and the heterogeneity in taste parameters can be explained by socio-demographics, attitudes and perceptions. However, although important for the overall project guidelines, the reader has to be alerted that presented results only hold under the current hypothetical situation, and cannot be generalized to real world applications. 30 years after the first study investigating the demand for teleshopping using discrete choice analysis (Manski and Salomon, 1987), we present an innovative survey design and a sophisticated modeling approach by investigating the relative importance of attributes related to the choice between in-store and online shopping for two product categories: Groceries, a typical experience good, and standard electronic appliances, a typical search good.