An experimental contingent valuation of users’ attitudes towards a Crowd Management System

Abstract

Smart city projects are being launched globally to enhance the well-being of citizens. Meanwhile, the value-added of the projects is not easy to evaluate due to the non-market nature of the public services provided. This study intends to investigate the attitudes of potential users of a Crowd Management System (CMS) to help with the decision-making on smart city projects. The CMS studied in this paper is applied in large-scale events to enable safe and efficient dissipation of event participants as one of the pilot Smart City projects in Hong Kong. It does so by providing real-time information on public transport for their return journeys when a large number of participants all finish their activities within a short time span. Reducing injuries of pedestrians can be achieved in major gatherings to improve safety. This paper presents an experimental analysis of users’ attitudes towards the CMS with the Contingent Valuation (CV) method. A marathon event in Hong Kong was chosen for an on-the-spot survey of actual users as part of an experimental study. Subsequently a similar survey was carried out off-site among marathon runners not participating in that event (as a control group) for data reliability comparison. The Willingness-to-Pay value is also derived from the pooled samples to evaluate users’ attitudes. Besides, the results indicate that runners’ perceived usefulness and online payment habit significantly influence the stated Willingness-to-Pay (WTP) for the CMS in question.