Understanding crowd-shipping acceptance: A hierarchical latent class personality-attitude hybrid choice model

This study aims to explore how people’s reported trip characteristics, personality traits and attitudes are associated with their willingness to participate in crowd-shipping (CS) system. CS is an emerging concept aiming at reducing the footprint of dedicated delivery trips. Within this service, ordinary citizens can be matched with a parcel with the origin and destination of close proximity to the traveler’s start and end of the pre-planned trip. To measure the feasibility and potential of CS, a stated adaptation choice (SAC) experiment was conducted, offering two unlabeled options adapted to the reported trips of respondents, plus the possibility of rejecting the request. A hierarchical latent class personality-attitude hybrid choice model (HLCPA-HCM) is employed to capture the variation in preference across individuals, providing insights into the discrete heterogeneity of different types of travelers. The model is estimated using the data collected from an SAC experiment, distributed among 486 respondents in the Netherlands. The results confirm the hierarchical structure of personality traits and attitudes, so that personality traits affect attitudes and attitudes contribute to the class-membership probability. Trip characteristics such as the number of trip legs and the mode used in the pick-up leg, CS attributes such as detours and monetary incentives, as well as the share of social network being active in the CS system significantly influence the CS acceptance. These findings offer valuable guidance for CS operators in customizing the parcel allocation and help to foster the growth of CS services.