Lucia Rotaris

Willingness to Pay for Fair Trade Coffee: A Conjoint Analysis Experiment with Italian Consumers

Coffee can be distributed via the conventional supply chain or via the alternative fair trade supply chain. The implications of this choice on the distribution of the value added among the actors of the chain are relevant. Fair trade coffee rewards relatively more the producers located in the developing countries. A survey applying stated preference data collection methods to Italian households has demonstrated that they are willing to pay a premium price for the certified fair trade coffee of about 2.2 euros for a 250 gram coffee packet. This premium price, however, can vary significantly according to age, gender, income, and purchasing habits of the consumers. The methodology used implemented state-of-the-art survey design techniques and advanced models specifications to capture preference heterogeneity.

A medium term evaluation of the Ecopass road pricing scheme in Milan: economic, environmental and transport impacts

The paper provides an evaluation of the Ecopass road pricing scheme for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. The term Ecopass conveys the stated political objective of the scheme: a PASS to improve the quality of the urban environment (ECO). The scheme has actually improved the air quality in Milan, although the recommended PM10 threshold is still exceeded for a larger number of days than that recommended by EU directives. This paper estimates the costs and benefits of the scheme three years after its implementation using the same methodology applied in Rotaris et al. (2010) for the year 2008. The results indicate that the benefits still exceed the costs, and by an increasing amount, but at an annual decreasing rate of improvement. The Ecopass scheme has proved beneficial, but it seems to have exhausted its potential: little further gains in air quality could be obtained via a fiscal incentive to improve the abatement technology of the vehicles. The new administration, elected in June 2011, was faced with the task of deciding whether to dismiss, maintain or change the Ecopass scheme. The prevailing idea coming from the Ecopass Commission and from the advocacy groups was to extend both the area of application and the number of classes subject to the charge. In November 2011 the new administration decided to substitute Ecopass with Area C, a policy based on a congestion charge which incorporates some environmental elements.

Value of travel time for university students: a revealed/stated preference analysis

Although the value of travel time (VTT) is extensively used in transport economics in order to conduct cost–benefit analysis and there have been numerous studies estimating this information for different countries, transport modes and type of users, there are very few estimates for the university students commuting from their hometown to the university-town. This article presents a VTT estimate for the students enrolled at the University of Trieste (Italy) based on sequential approach which: (1) collects revealed preference data in order to estimate a preliminary VTT; (2) generates C-efficient Bayesian designs pivoted around the characteristics of homogenous segments of the population and (3) administers an integrated revealed and stated preference questionnaire to a selected sample. The estimate obtained on the basis of the combined revealed and stated preference data ranges from 2.8 to 1.4€/h is significantly lower than the estimates obtained on the bases of the revealed preference data only, which ranges from 18 to 13€/h, and differs from the VTT for commuting to work reported in the literature by a factor of about 6.

The Potential Demand for Carsharing by University Students: An Italian Case Study

The paper presents a methodology to estimate the potential demand for carsharing by university students. The methodology is based on three surveys: a paper-and-pencil questionnaire; a detailed computer-assisted personal interview, and a contingent valuation interview. The data collected are used to operationalize a model that estimates the generalized cost under alternative scenarios, with and without carsharing. A Monte Carlo simulation procedure is used to estimate the probability that a person would use carsharing. The methodology has been tested with students enrolled at the University of Trieste. The main finding is that, under the prevailing conditions, a quite large number of the sample students (32%) would benefit in terms of generalised cost from the use of carsharing if a private car were unavailable. The model is also used to perform scenario analysis.

Understanding the demand for carsharing : lessons from Italian case studies.

The aim of this paper is to estimate the potential demand for carsharing, to this aim a model which calculates the total generalized cost for a given mobility pattern and transport mode mix is developed. The model considers : a) that a person sometimes travels with friends and family, and therefore shares the travel expenses and/or satisfies several travel needs, and b) that uses in given time period more than one mode of transport. The parameters of the model are derived by detailed, face-to-face, computer-assisted interviews. A limited number of interviews have been so far completed. However, they hint to some very interesting empirical evidence. It is found that car ownership is currently very high in the Italian families and that the car is used extensively both for work\study and, especially, for other-than-work\study trip purposes. Offering a carsharing service (CS) would enhance the mode choice and could, in some cases, lower the total mobility costs. The respondents assign quite a large value to the pleasure of owning a car, much more so than the pleasure of being carsharing users, both for workers and for students. Consequently, the respondents would dislike not owing a private car, while having the choice between the private and the carsharing car is preferred especially by the students. The mobility cost indicators reflect, but not perfectly, the preference-based choices of the sample. Three individual case studies are further analyzed. They have been defined as : a low, a medium and a high mobility case study. The low mobility case study shows that these persons would largely benefit from the existence of a CS service, they would use it occasionally and they would probably be willing to forgo the private car. The medium mobility case study shows that the variables parking time, access time and CS fare can easily switch the balance between convenience and inconvenience of using CS. The higher mobility case study in a small town setting demonstrates that in such circumstances the prospects for a viable CS service are rather bleak.

Commuting Behaviour and Residential Choices by University Students

Italian university students often attend a university located in a nearby city, and choose between commuting from their home town and living in the city where the university is located. The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that influence this choice. A conceptual framework is developed and an empirical investigation is performed analysing as driving factors the distance between home town and university town, rental costs, travel time, weekly frequency of attendance, course year in which the student is enrolled, student’s age and family income. According to the results obtained the critical isochrone varies from 65 to 75 km, and the monetary value of one hour of travel time is 13 euros. Finally, the impact of the policies currently implemented by the University of Trieste is analysed.

Environmental quality and accessibility trade-offs in household residential location choice

The paper illustrates a method to detect and estimate interaction effects in household decision-making and tests the representative member hypothesis by studying how preferences of single members influence family choices. We performed a stated choice experiment concerning hypothetical choices among alternative residential locations. We found that the rankings of the attributes for the family and for each member were the same. The estimated coefficients for each member were statistically different from family ones, which demonstrates the fallacy of the representative member hypothesis. We estimated single members’ relative power at the attribute level and extended a model developed in the literature to three-member groups.

Composite indicators of sustainable urban mobility: Estimating the rankings frequency distribution combining multiple methodologies

ABSTRACT The contribution of this paper consists in applying several techniques to estimate a composite indicator of sustainable urban mobility for 116 Italian provincial towns, as proposed by Luzzati and Gucciardi (2015). The aim is to provide the decision-maker with a richer set of information on sustainable mobility, making explicit the impact of the techniques used on the values obtained. A set of 16 indicators with a nested structure has been selected and 33 combinations of normalization, weighting, and aggregation techniques are applied. The results are presented by city, by city groupings (size and location), and focusing on the ten largest Italian cities. It is found that small cities perform better in terms of sustainable mobility than medium or large cities. As expected, in some cases (e.g., Milan) the intervals of the results obtained are quite large, indicating that the techniques used to normalize, weight, and aggregate the indicators highly affect the performance indexes. In other cases (e.g., Rome) the results are stable across methodologies.