Are there latent effects in shopping destination choice?: Survey methods and response behavior

Abstract

Destination choice is an essential element in transportation planning processes. The problem is to find the probability that a person traveling from a given origin will choose a destination among many available alternatives. Destination choice models have several challenges including large choice sets, complicated alternative specific attributes and an endogeneity problem. Determining the destination of trips with no fixed destinations such as shopping and recreational trips (unlike mandatory trips) has been a focus of research as soon as the activity/ tour– based paradigms were introduced. Nonetheless, the classic destination choice models have paid little attention to psychological and latent personal attributes of travelers. In the last decade, several studies on shopper behavior in shopping centers have revealed that in addition to observable demographic and socio- economic variables, latent constructs such as psychological variables, lifestyle and the profile of the center are important indicators to capture the behavior of travelers. This paper provides detailed information about the survey design, recruitment and pre-test fieldwork of this study. An initial investigation of the data and its quality attributes, descriptions of the sampling structure and response behavior are presented.