Preferences for alternative short sea shipping opportunities

This paper investigates the role of preference and scale heterogeneity in the mode choice process of shippers in the Atlantic Canada–US eastern seaboard market. The generalised mixed logit model is estimated to account for heterogeneity in preferences for frequency of departure of freight transport services, along with heterogeneity in scale across respondents. The contributions of the paper to the literature are: the revelation of significant preference and scale heterogeneity in the sample; the estimated distribution of shippers’ willingness-to-pay for gains in service frequency; and the confirmation that there is merit in accounting for scale heterogeneity in future and revisited choice studies.