Customers’ preferences for freight service attributes of China Railway Express

Abstract

China Railway Express (CRE) is one of the most important constituent parts of the Belt and Road Initiative. Freight demand analysis is fundamental as a basis for the operational strategy of CRE and the investment policy along the CRE-routes. Most of the existing relevant literature has focused on the organization of the train operations of CRE, with little research related to demand analysis. This paper contributes to filling this gap by estimating customers' demand preferences for rail freight service attributes, by using a novel multi-criteria decision-analysis (MCDA) method namely Best-Worst Method (BWM). To this end, a BWM survey was conducted in China to capture customers' preferences for the main attributes that define the transport service offered by CRE. Two variants of BWM, the linear and the Bayesian, are employed for the analysis. Reliability is suggested as the most important attribute for CRE to focus on, to gain customers. We also conduct a cluster analysis based on the results, which helps the CRE operator to identify homogeneous customer segments, and to optimize the use of CRE's resources with a differentiated pricing strategy.

A Choice Experiment Model for Honey Attributes: Italian Consumer Preferences and Socio-Demographic Profiles

“…Heterogeneity of preference was estimated by performing a latent class analysis (LCA). This analysis helped us to identify natural classes (clusters or segments) in the sample of respondents with homogeneous preferences [33]. LCA uses statistical criteria to test the validity of the model and generate the most appropriate numbers of cluster [34].…”

“…Referring to certification about welfare and safekeeping of bees to guarantee animal protection and respecting their ecosystem. [11,17,33] Environmental sustainability Safeguarding the environment and biodiversity. Sensorial characteristics flavour Taste.…”

Wastewater treatment technology selection using a hybrid multicriteria decision‐making method

“…The BWM is a pairwise comparison-based method. It has been employed as a methodology for several MCDM problems, such as technology evaluation (Ren et al, 2017;Yang et al, 2018;Kheybari et al, 2019b), location selection (Kheybari et al, 2019a;Parhizgarsharif et al, 2019), supply chain management (Rezaei et al, 2015(Rezaei et al, , 2016Sadaghiani et al, 2015;Ahmad et al, 2017;Ahmadi et al, 2017;Mohaghar et al, 2017;Haeri and Rezaei, 2019), water management (Chitsaz and Azarnivand, 2017), performance evaluation (Rezaei et al, 2016(Rezaei et al, , 2018bLi et al, 2020), innovation management (Gupta et al, 2020), sustainability (Kheybari and Pooya, 2021), quality assessment (Rezaei et al, 2018a), quality control (Singh et al, 2020), and information system management (Kheybari et al, 2020).…”

Multicriteria Intermodal Freight Network Optimal Problem with Heterogeneous Preferences under Belt and Road Initiative

“…Unlike in scenario A, where all shippers share the same preference, each demand flow in scenario B is divided into three clusters from that in scenario A on the basis of the membership size. The different preferences and sizes of three clusters are obtained from Li et al [51].In the aforementioned study, a stated preference survey was conducted from 29th March 2019 to 18th April 2019 via face-to-face personal interviews at Chengdu International Railway Service Co., Ltd. in China. This company is one of the important platforms where CRexpress' customers from all over the country gather.…”