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International audiencePlace attachment is one’s strong emotional bond with a specific location. While there are numerous studies on the topic, the literature pays little attention to commercial settings. This is because they are seen as too insipid to rouse attachment. Consumer research, however, suggests otherwise. To address this disparity, the authors investigate how people develop, experience, and act on place attachment in commercial settings. Findings from consumer in-depth interviews and self-reports conducted in France reveal that place attachment develops through perceptions of familiarity, authenticity, and security and evolves into experiences of homeyness. Consumers find these encounters of homeyness extraordinary and respond by engaging in volunteering, over-reciprocation, and ambassadorship toward the place. The authors further theorize these findings through a gift economy perspective and identify a tripartite exchange between the consumer, the proprietor of the place, and selected people from the consumer’s social network

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Multipurpose shopping is a prominent and relevant feature of shopping behavior. However, no methodology is available to assess empirically how the demand for multipurpose shopping depends on retail agglomeration or, in general, the characteristics of retail supply, such as the numbers and types of stores in a shopping center or the number of categories in a supermarket. The authors propose a nested-logit model that captures retail agglomeration effects on consumer choice of shopping trip purpose (what to buy) and destination (where to buy). The authors estimate parameters representing trip purpose-adjustment and betweenstore attraction effects on shopping trip data collected from a sample of 1704 households in The Netherlands. Both effects are significant for each of the three categories for which the model is estimated. This is consistent with the idea of agglomeration effects. The findings suggest that agglomeration helps attract not only multipurpose but also singlepurpose trips. A comparison of multi-and single-purpose trip model predictions shows that single-purpose models underpredict the number of trips to larger shopping centers.

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The authors propose and illustrate an extension of the method of Hierarchical Information Integration (HII). HII allows one to handle large numbers of attributes in conjoint tasks by designing subexperiments that include subsets of attributes. It assumes that individuals can use general attributes or decision constructs to summarize their impressions of these subsets, which could be clusters of detailed, managerially relevant attributes. The proposed extension involves the design of sub-experiments that include attributes plus summary evaluations of remaining constructs. Advantages are that subexperiments can be analyzed separately but also jointly to estimate one overall preference or choice model; a more flexible and easy task is obtained; and one can test the assumed hierarchical decision structure. The authors illustrate the approach with an application that models consumer choice of shopping center. In this application, results partially support the hierarchical structure and predictive validity. Finally, the authors discuss implications for further research.