Correlates of mall visit frequency

Abstract

We study the relationships between mall shopping frequency and background variables, both demographic and those related to shopping motivations, which characterize shoppers at a mall. We test a specific renewal process underlying mall visits, and find that a Poisson-gamma model, commonly used to explain grocery shopping trips, fits our mall shopping data well. We account for measurement error due to forgetting by survey respondents. Using our renewal and recall model we obtain adjusted or true correlations between customer variables and shopping frequency. We are able to test hypotheses about the relationships between mall shopping frequency and characteristics of shoppers such as functional shopping motivation, deal proneness, recreational shopping motivation, age, income and family size.