E-scooters have conquered urban areas as a means for individual mobility and compete with other modes of transportation. While some studies endorse e-scooters as eco-friendly solution for crowded cities, others report contradictory findings and highlight safety issues. To reveal factors affecting e-scooter usage from a consumer's perspective, a study using an adapted Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) is conducted. Based on random sampling among German public transportation services, 749 responses were collected and analyzed. E-scooters are studied in the context of mobility alternatives, revealing that they are mostly viewed as fun objects, and perceived safety indeed impedes their usage. Additionally, environmental concerns and individual convenience (i.e., performance expectancy) evince to represent the main drivers for using e-scooter. Besides, differences in the motivation for (potential) usage were found between owners and non-owners. Regarding the ecological assessment of e-scooters, they may, in fact, substitute walking over short distances.
As research on sustainability orientation across generations is still sparse, we contribute to literature by enriching this research field, focusing on Generation Z (‘Zers’) and X (‘Xers’). Moreover, no other study has analyzed cross-generational differences in the sustainability context by making use of choice experiments, which overcome issues related to (Likert) scale item investigations, and allow respondents to evaluate the trade-off between different purchase factors simultaneously. We thus applied one of the most recent advancements in choice experiments, named Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint analysis, which appears to be more realistic than previous alternatives. The results indicate Zers consume more sustainably (inter alia higher importance of social labels; higher purchase likelihood) when shopping online; however, differences within each generation were uncovered, especially among Xers (e.g., gender differences regarding importance of price).
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