• ICLV model of working commuters’ willingness to work as crowd shippers. • Longer travel time, higher costs and higher service frequency reduce participation. • Non-cash incentives (free Wi-Fi, OTT, vouchers) strongly increase participation. • Lower-income workers more willing; high-income and highly educated less willing. • Openness increases participation, while conscientiousness reduces it. This study investigates the determinants of willingness to participate in crowd shipping (WTP-CS) for the working population within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. It explores socioeconomic factors, personality traits, and travel correlates to WTP-CS by testing an integrated choice and latent variable (ICLV) modeling framework. Four conclusions are drawn. First, longer travel times and higher costs diminish WTP-CS, while economic incentives (e.g., free Wi-Fi services) are positively associated with WTP-CS. Second, lower-income individuals are positively inclined toward crowd shipping, while females and older individuals display less inclination toward crowd shipping. Third, increasing the number of services offered by crowd shippers negatively affects WTP-CS. Fourth, individuals with higher levels of the openness personality trait exhibit a positive inclination toward WTP-CS, whereas those with higher conscientiousness tend to exhibit a more reserved attitude toward WTP-CS. The findings emphasize the role of individual traits in shaping participation behaviors in crowd shipping initiatives, and in contrast to most existing crowd shipping studies that focus on users or developed-country contexts, provide new evidence on supply-side participation among working commuters in emerging markets in a less-studied region.
Saxena et al. (Sat,) studied this question.