Environmental Engineering Reference
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Behavioral Modeling of Urban Freight
Transport
Testing Non-Linear Policy Effects for Retailers
Edoardo Marcucci and Valerio Gatta
Abstract Decision makers in urban goods movement (UGM) typically need to
assess the impact new policy interventions might have on freight distribution. The
effects of policy changes are inextricably related with the extant regulatory
framework that also influences the relationships among the various actors inter-
acting along the supply chain. The operators commonly considered important,
given the crucial role they play in UGM, are: retailers, transport providers, and
own-account. Notwithstanding the admittedly important role that a detailed
knowledge of these three agent categories has for a correct policy implementation
there is a limited knowledge concerning the specific preferences and behavior of
each agent-type. It is de facto assumed that retailers, own-account and transport
providers have homogenous preferences and can be seamlessly treated. The
upsurge of behavioral models and the acquisition of data necessary to predict
goods and vehicle flows both under the current and, more importantly, under
altered policy/regulatory conditions explains the progressive importance that is
attributed to an agent-based perspective. This research reports the result of a stated
ranking exercise conducted in the Limited Traffic Zone in 2009 in the city center
of Rome focusing on retailers which demand freight transport services and play an
important role in extended supply chains. This paper proposes a comparison
between two different Multinomial Logit model specifications where non-linear
effects for the variations of the levels of the attributes considered are studied and
detected. A meaningful comparison between willingness to pay measures derived
by the two model specifications is proposed so to avoid known scale problems. The
results obtained are very interesting and meaningful from a policy perspective
since they show potentially differentiated effects of the policy implemented in
deep contrast with the, often assumed, homogenous effect hypothesis.
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