Assessing preferences for mega shopping centres : a conjoint measurement approach

In 2004, the Dutch central government decided to liberalise her restricted retail policy, allowing the development of mega shopping centres. This study aims at eliciting consumers' preferences for this kind of new developments. Consumers visiting a down town shopping centre and one of the largest out-of-town shopping centres in the Netherlands were presented descriptions of different hypothetical mega shopping centres, systematically varying on 10 attributes. The consumers were asked to select the centre they preferred most from sets of two centres. The following attributes were used to define the mega shopping centres: accessibility by car, accessibility by public transport, parking tariff, length of the main shopping streets, type of shopping supply, type of anchor stores, type of traffic allowed in the shopping centre, design style, scale of the shopping streets, and type of entertainment activities in the shopping centre. Over 300 respondents completed the online questionnaire. A discrete choice (random parameter mixed logit) model was estimated to assess the effect of each attribute level. All attributes showed a significant impact on the preference for a mega shopping centre. In addition significant differences between segments of consumers were found. The model performs well.