# Influencing factors that determine the usage of the crowd-shipping services

## TL;DR

This study investigates factors influencing sender choices between crowd-shipping and traditional carriers, highlighting cost, real-time services, and product type as key determinants, with implications for logistics strategy.

## Contribution

It applies RUM and RRM models to identify influential factors in crowd-shipping service selection using survey data, providing insights into sender preferences and service design.

## Key findings

- Shipping costs and real-time services significantly influence sender choices.
- Senders are willing to pay more for crowd-shipping for groceries and medicines.
- RUM and RRM models have similar predictive accuracies.

## Abstract

The objective of this study is to understand how senders choose shipping services for different products, given the availability of both emerging crowd-shipping (CS) and traditional carriers in a logistics market. Using data collected from a US survey, Random Utility Maximization (RUM) and Random Regret Minimization (RRM) models have been employed to reveal factors that influence the diversity of decisions made by senders. Shipping costs, along with additional real-time services such as courier reputations, tracking info, e-notifications, and customized delivery time and location, have been found to have remarkable impacts on senders' choices. Interestingly, potential senders were willing to pay more to ship grocery items such as food, beverages, and medicines by CS services. Moreover, the real-time services have low elasticities, meaning that only a slight change in those services will lead to a change in sender-behavior. Finally, data-science techniques were used to assess the performance of the RUM and RRM models and found to have similar accuracies. The findings from this research will help logistics firms address potential market segments, prepare service configurations to fulfill senders' expectations, and develop effective business operations strategies.