An analysis of the impact of information and communication technologies on non-maintenance shopping activities

This paper examines the use and travel impacts of two forms of information and communication technologies (ICTs): mobile telephones and computers. The travel impacts are examined in the context of participation in out-of-home non-maintenance shopping activities over a multiweek period through the modeling of the duration between successive shopping activity participations. The empirical analysis uses a continuous six-week travel survey collected in the cities of Halle and Karlsruhe in Germany in the Fall of 1999. The results indicate that the effects of ICTs on activity-travel patterns are mediated by individual sociodemographic and locational factors, as well as by unobserved individual characteristics. The results also show that the substitution between mobile phone use and shopping travel is grossly underestimated if the effects of common unobserved factors affecting mobile phone use and shopping travel are not considered. In addition, there is quite substantial intra-individual variation in intershopping duration. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.