Spatial shopping behaviour
15 important questions on Spatial shopping behaviour
What is a City? (Glaeser, 2007)
- Absence of physical space between people and firms
- Density or proximity, perhaps combined with sufficient scale
- Formal and somewhat arbitrary political units that bear the name "cities"or "metropolitan areas"
- Mismatch concept vs. Data: economists are pragmatic
- Despite the 'death of distance'...
- Despite higher land rents...
How do consumer characteristics affect spatial shopping behaviour?
- It is often stated that older persons are less mobile and therefore more likely to shop close to their place of residence
- that households with young children tend to do less out-shopping (or more in- shopping).
- They concluded that incomers – as they define people who moved less than sixteen years ago to the local area – tend to do more out-shopping, but it is commuting that is the primary determinant of out-shopping.
Why do cities have many different types of consumer services? What caused what?
- Walter Christaller: Central Place Theory
- All consumers need to access all goods and services
- Quantity purchased involves trade-off between:
- Price of good
- Transportation cost involved in getting to the store
- Producers need to consider optimal size and pricing of goods
- Hence, beginnings of a general equilibrium problem, linking spatial supply and spatial demand
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What is an important similarity in shopping behaviour in the five countries (Figure 1 & 2)?
- It appears that in all countries the towns are the most important places for shopping. In almost all countries (except the Netherlands), the hinterland households too buy most goods and services in town.
- A Town; B Hinterland; C 7–16 km zone; D Supra-regional
Threshold of a good: milk and opera
- You need more customers to offer the service and a larger area to draw customers from
- Higher order goods vs lower order goods
- Supply side: existence of indivisibilities (ondeelbaarheden) in the provision of certain goods or facilities
- We can neither construct 1/3 of a theathre in a small village nor buy only 2 minutes of opera
When looking at the final results (Table 6 & 7), what can we rightly conclude?
for all kinds of distances it holds that the further away a facility, the less likely it is that a consumer will go there.
Spatial Hierarchy: Multiple Goods
- Each good/service will have its own threshold, range
- Assignment to different sizes of communities
- Endogenous growth process - communities grow because they offer greater range of goods and services
- End up with an hierarchy of urban areas
Shopping behaviour of urban consumers (Rajagopal, 2011)
- Shopping behaviour is a perceived action that emerges to satisfy the needs of consumers through appropriate reasoning.
- Voluntary
- Deliberate
- Motivated by individual and group behaviour of fellow consumers
- Hedonic values of consumer motivations diverge for different locations and product categories
Determinants of the location choice I
- Accesibility
- Distance
- Congestion inside and outside store/shopping mall
- Opening hours
- Attractiveness
- Size, assortment
- Instore ambiance
- The location relates to one's lifestyle/social class
The advantages of cities wordt mogelijk gemaakt door (2)
- increasing returns to scale
- firm specific
agglomeration economies
- benefits of being located amid other businesses
- big labour market
- big consumer market
- external to the firm
Online vs in-store motivations
- Shopping is not just about obtaining tangible products but also enjoyment and socializing which can positively contribute to customers' well-being.
Hedonic vs utilitarian behaviour (Bridges & Florsheim, 2008)
- Utilitarian motivations: convenience; time-saving; cost saving; product variety
- Hedonic motivations: enjoyment; social interaction; Excitement or Adventure; idea shopping
Regional differences between on- and offline shopping
- Online shopping was an urban phenomenon (Boschma and Weltevreden, 2008)
- Urban consumers are more likely to buy online
- Urban retailers are more likely to sell online
- More attractive places are likely to attract more in-store shoppers
- Urban-rural differences appear, based on type of product (De Blasio, 2008)
Amentities grouped (vriendschappelijke contacten)
- Labels components
- Shopping attractiveness
- Leisure attractiveness
- Car/other transport accessibility
- Different persons have different preferences
- Car owners have higher preferences for car-related accessibility
- Other transport users more the shopping value
- Impacts online shopping behaviour
- Impacts number of in store purchases
Discussion Weltevreden and Rietbergen
- No distinction between types of purchases
- E.g. Run, fun and goal shipping
- No link in the paper between perceived attractiveness and objective variables
- Causality issues?
- Perception of attractiveness and online shopping behaviour
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