Esra Suel

Empirical Application of Expenditure Diary Instrument to Quantify Relationships Between In-Store and Online Grocery Shopping: Case Study of Greater London

There is a sustained shift of certain types of retail activity away from in-store shopping and toward online retailing, with potentially structural consequences for shopping-related mobility. In the United Kingdom, for instance, 5.1% of spending on groceries in 2013 was transacted online, an increase from 3.8% in 2010. (The level was 1.1% in 2003.) Transport researchers face serious gaps in empirical data coverage of this phenomenon, however, because regional and national travel surveys typically collect limited information with which to establish how in-store and online shopping relate to one another. To address this issue, the authors employed a well-established data resource in a novel approach. The UK Living Costs and Food Survey is traditionally used to track aggregate household expenditure patterns and to monitor price inflation. This study drew on the unique nature of the surveys expenditure diary, in which respondents recorded each item that they purchased during a 2-week period; respondents also recorded whether each shopping occasion was in-store or online. Empirically, it was found that shopping basket characteristics (types of products being purchased) were significantly linked with channel choice (online versus in-store). Furthermore, with a two-stage modeling approach, it was found that sociodemographic factors appeared to relate in different ways to adoption of online shopping in general and to the choice of online versus in-store for individual shopping occasions. The paper closes with a brief discussion of research needs to advance this line of inquiry.

Sustainable Investment in Turkey: The Case in Context - An Update

This paper is a sequel to the “Sustainable Investment in Turkey, 2010” report (IFC, 2011). The original report provided a review of the then current state of the sustainable investment (SI) in Turkey and analysed the institutional prerequisites and interventions that would encourage better allocation of financial capital to sustainable firms. This update seeks to study Turkey as a case to analyse SI challenges and prospects in emerging markets with a focus on equity investments through stock exchanges and sustainability indices.The focus on stock markets is motivated by the emerging emphasis on the role of stock exchanges in promoting SI as articulated in the objectives of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) Initiative. Although this paper provides an update to the relevant sections of the original report, its ultimate objective is to reflect on Turkey’s experience as a case study to assess the feasibility of sustainability indices in promoting SI in emerging markets.

Incorporating online shopping into travel demand modelling: challenges, progress, and opportunities

ABSTRACT There is a large body of literature, spanning multiple disciplines, concerned with the relationship between traditional (physical) shopping and associated travel behaviour. However, despite the recent rapid growth of digital retailing and online shopping, the impact on travel behaviour remain poorly understood. Although the issue of the substitution and complementarity between conventional and virtual retail channels has been extensively explored, few attempts have been made to extend this work so as to incorporate virtual retail channels into modelling frameworks that can link shopping and mobility decisions. Here, we review the existing literature base with a focus on most relevant dimensions for personal mobility. How online activity can be incorporated into operational transport demand models and benefits of such effort are discussed. Existing frameworks of shopping demand are flexible and can, in principle, be extended to incorporate virtual shopping and the associated additional complexities. However, there are significant challenges associated with lack of standard ontologies for crucial concepts and insufficiencies in traditional data collection methods. Also, supply-side questions facing businesses and policy-makers are changing as retailing goes through a digital transformation. Opportunities and priorities need to be defined for future research directions for an assessment of existing tools and frameworks.

A hazard-based approach to modelling the effects of online shopping on intershopping duration

Despite growing prevalence of online shopping, its impacts on mobility are poorly understood. This partially results from the lack of sufficiently detailed data. In this paper we address this gap using consumer panel data, a new dataset for this context. We analyse one year long longitudinal grocery shopping purchase data from London shoppers to investigate the effects of online shopping on overall shopping activity patterns and personal trips. We characterise the temporal structure of shopping demand by means of the duration between shopping episodes using hazard-based duration models. These models have been used to study inter-shopping spells for traditional shopping in the literature, however effects of online shopping were not considered. Here, we differentiate between shopping events and shopping trips. The former refers to all types of shopping activity including both online and in-store, while the latter is restricted to physical shopping trips. Separate models were estimated for each and results suggest potential substitution effects between online and in-store in the context of grocery shopping. We find that having shopped online since the last shopping trip significantly reduces the likelihood of a physical shopping trip. We do not observe the same effect for inter-event durations. Hence, shopping online does not have a significant effect on overall shopping activity frequency, yet affects shopping trip rates. This is a key finding and suggests potential substitution between online shopping and physical trips to the store. Additional insights on which factors, including basket size and demographics, affect inter-shopping durations are also drawn.