Diversity in diversification: an analysis of shopping trips in six-week travel diary data

Diversification in shopping, a long-pursued subject in consumer behavior analysis, is approached from a broad perspective of the diversity in daily travel patterns, which may or may not involve shopping trips, as well as the diversity in shopping locations and frequency. The focus of this analysis is on the heterogeneity across individuals in the ways in which they each diversify their respective shopping behavior. This study explores differences across individuals in the variations of their shopping travel patterns across days. Treating the day-of-the-week evolution of shopping travel patterns as a stochastic process, characteristics of diversification are quantified for respective individuals. Finally, heterogeneity across individuals is identified using an array of statistical methods. The analysis, based on results of a six-week travel diary survey in Germany with geo-coded activity locations, reveals the effects of individual, household, and urban attributes on diversification in shopping behavior, including that full-time workers with medium incomes (4000–4999 Deutsche Mark per month) tend to have more variations in their shopping engagement.