What drives people? Analyzing leisure-shopping trip decision making

Because of the strong increase in the number of leisure-shopping trips, a shift towards more sustainable leisure-shopping behaviour is desirable. This can be attained by having a better insight into people’s reasoning in choosing a transport mode and shopping location for this type of activities. Thus, this paper highlights individuals’ leisure-trip decision-making processes. The uniqueness of this study is the use of a large sample group, consisting of 221 respondents. A Computer-Based Causal Network Elicitation Technique is developed for this purpose, and participants’ responses are analyzed by means of Frequent Itemset Analysis. It appears that the complexity of the mental representation of the decision problem is very stable over different socio-demographic groups. However, clear differences appear between these groups concerning the content of the mental representation. The most remarkable findings are the limited importance of cost and environmental aspects in the transport mode choice. This has important implications for policy and marketing efforts to encourage sustainable transport modes for leisure-shopping. It is recommended to focus advertising campaigns and policy measures on aspects that are most important in people’s decision making process: flexibility, travel time, accessibility, easiness for parking and some practical concerns.