Influencing Factors in Accepting a Crowd-Sourced Delivery Integrated into Mobility-as-a-Service

This paper investigates determinants of travelers' willingness to be crowd-shippers using an integrated system incorporating Crowd-Sourced Delivery (CSD) tasks into a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) framework. Given that the success of CSD relies on a sufficient number of crowd-shippers, in order to attract more ordinary travelers participating in CSD, we propose an innovative service that incorporates CSD into MaaS framework, providing travelers with CSD information through a single app while planning their trips. To explore the willingness of citizens to become crowd-shippers, we designed a stated choice experiment enabling respondents to simultaneously make choices concerning transportation modes and parcel delivery decisions. An error component mixed logit model is estimated to identify the effects of various factors in the decision-making process, and to capture the covariance between transportation modes with similar features in parcel delivery. The estimation results reveal that respondents’ willingness to accept or decline a parcel delivery task varies across different transportation modes and generally traditional transportation modes are preferred as carriers. As for the features of parcel delivery tasks, type of parcel (fragile or not) and amount of monetary incentive are the important determinants to accept delivery tasks, regardless of the type of transportation modes. Moreover, the travel context, such as weather, and socio-demographics attributes, like age, also show influence in being crowd-shippers, with their effects varying across different transportation modes. These insights offer valuable information for transportation planners, contributing to the advancement of more sustainable and efficient delivery options particularly for last-mile delivery.