Tommy Gärling

Tommy Gärling
University of Gothenburg | GU · Department of Psychology

PhD

About

407
Publications
242,391
Reads
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25,980
Citations
Additional affiliations
January 2015 - December 2017
University of Gothenburg
Position
  • Professor Emeritus
January 2015 - December 2017
University of Gothenburg
Position
  • Emeritus Professor of Psychology

Publications

Publications (407)
Article
Some decision outcomes consist of sequences of single experiences. The aim is to propose a conceptualization of how such sequences are evaluated if affective evaluations of single experiences evoke transient emotional responses with lasting changes in current mood. The conceptualization implies three modes in which the sequences of single experienc...
Article
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The aim of this registered report is to investigate how the core components of subjective wellbeing, Life Satisfaction (LS) and Emotional Wellbeing (EWB), differ with respect to their relationship to antecedent factors. Seven factors are proposed that have been found in previous research to antecede LS and EWB. Social Comparisons, Meaningfulness, E...
Article
Purpose The paper aims to investigate differences in non-professional and professional stock investors’ trust in and tendency to follow financial analysts’ buy and sell recommendations. Design/methodology/approach Online experiment conducted in Sweden in March 2022 comparing non-professional private investors ( n = 80), professional investors ( n...
Preprint
Two experiments with undergraduates as subjects were carried out with the aim of replicating and extending previous results showing that the implication of thebehavioral life-cycle hypothesis (H. M. Shefrin & R. H. Thaler, 1988) that people classify assets in different mental accounts (current income, current assets, and future income) may explain...
Article
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This study examined how satisfaction with aspects of running the business as well as satisfaction with aspects of the private life are related to small-business owners' subjective well-being (SWB). Measures were obtained of both life satisfaction (LS) and emotional well-being (EWB) to investigate possible differences. Questionnaire data from a surv...
Article
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Do owned objects become more valued if lost and found? In Experiment 1, Prolific participants (n = 128) imagined having lost a laptop. The results showed a preference for finding the laptop instead of replacing it with a new at no cost. The preference was even stronger if the laptop had been used longer (2 months instead of 2 days) and was certain...
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The aim of this study is to investigate whether income has different relationships to subjective well‐being in richer countries compared to poorer ones. We report analyses based on interview data collected in the European Social Survey ( n = 72,574) that examine how income relates to life satisfaction (LS) and emotional well‐being (EWB) in 28 Europ...
Article
Purpose This paper aims to investigate whether loan officers' risk taking in credit decisions are associated with their personal financial risk preference and personality traits or solely with bank-contextual and loan-relevant factors. Design/methodology/approach An online survey administered in six large Swedish banks to 163 loan officers respons...
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The aim is to investigate the value basis of Socially Responsible Retirement Investments (SRRI) in a study of Swedish pension investors in the age range 18 to 65 years (N=1005). Logistic regression analyses were performed with self-reported SRRI choice as dependent variable and different levels of values as independent variables. On a higher level...
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In the Nordic countries with growing markets for consumer credit, a concern is that consumption desires in conjunction with easily accessible credit make financially constrained young adults vulnerable to problem debt and over-indebtedness. In addressing this concern empirically, we investigate whether retail offers of instalment payments of discou...
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Previous research has shown that the unemployed has lower life satisfaction than the employed but that their emotional well-being may not differ. The aim is to investigate the role of mediators with bearings on these differences between the employed and unemployed in emotional well-being compared to life satisfaction. Participants were 3,463 employ...
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This paper sets the stage for research on sustainable investment (SI) related to psychological well-being (PWB). It recognizes the threat of current global consumption levels to exceed the planetary boundaries and asks what roles financial markets may play in reducing these threats without compromising PWB. SI integrates environmental (E), social (...
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Many studies analysing the relationship between attitudes and travel behaviour have found that travel attitudes have an important impact on travel mode choice. More recently, studies focusing on how people experience travel have shown that travel satisfaction is influenced by the chosen travel mode. The desire and intention of using a travel mode –...
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Business growth is often portrayed as an important outcome for small-business owners. Few empirical studies have however examined whether there is a positive relationship between business size and different dimensions of small-business owners’ subjective well-being. In a large cross-sectional sample (n = 1089) of small-business owners from Sweden,...
Article
What makes everyday travel satisfying or dissatisfying, and how does satisfaction or dissatisfaction with everyday travel influence well-being? To address these questions self-report ratings of satisfaction with travel have been developed and used primarily in studies of commutes to and from work. Main findings include: (1) Satisfaction is lower wi...
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Several pressures on planetary boundaries are directly linked to the production of goods and services driven by people’s ever-increasing spending of money to improve their material living standard beyond a comfortable life. The over-spending on material consumption by people in industrialized countries, and in the growing middle and upper classes o...
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Using Item Response Theory to analyse survey data from a representative sample of 551 Swedish citizens, a new 16-question measure of fact-based financial literacy is developed and validated. Uni-dimensionality of the measure is verified, and expected correlations are observed with an existing measure of fact-based financial literacy, a measure of s...
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We propose a theory of how situational activation of values evokes positive and negative feelings. In conjunction we present a re-conceptualization of Schwartz’ et al. (J Personal Soc Psychol 103:663–688, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1037/a029393) value set including additional values. In our new value set, we posit contrastive values having opposite v...
Chapter
Consumer credit is a major financial market worldwide. The market is a driver of economic growth that benefits consumers by allowing them to make purchases at times they otherwise could not afford. In this chapter we focus on consumers’ use of credit to fund purchases and how decisions to borrow are made. We also consider consequences of credit use...
Article
Introduction Travel behavior research has only started to address how travel affects emotional wellbeing. The development of measurement methods is an important goal of this research. Methods A review and assessment of methods of measuring travel-related emotional wellbeing is presented guided by a conceptual framework specifying what is measured...
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The aim is to investigate whether elevated risk taking in asset market experiments driven by rank-based performance incentives decrease if removing a time limit on choices and minimizing complexity of strategic optimization. In a scenario experiment, business school students (n = 123) acting as investment managers in a fund company make investments...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social comparison and motivation to compete account for elevated risk-taking in fund management corroborated by asset market experiments when performance depends on rank-based incentives. Design/methodology/approach In two laboratory experiments, university students ( n 1 = 240/ n 2 = 120) ma...
Article
We develop a conceptual analysis and account of how emotions influence behavior in financial markets. To motivate our approach and to establish the need for such research, we first review the increasingly important literature on emotions in financial markets. While emotions influence investors in financial markets, there is a lack of precision conc...
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The aim is to investigate how present‐biased temporal discounting caused by feelings of financial deficit, attitude toward borrowing, and financial involvement and knowledge determine young adults’ likelihood of borrowing to purchases of desired consumer products. A sample of 273 young adults aged 18 to 30 years answered an online questionnaire inc...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review behavioral explanations of the empirical observation that investment managers in mutual fund companies increase their risk taking when offered incentives based on how their performance is ranked compared to peers. Design/methodology/approach A conceptual model is proposed of how research on social com...
Chapter
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Young adults use credit cards and store installments to borrow to consumption that improves their material life-style, for instance purchases of new models of smartphones, computers or other electronic gadgets, weekend travel or vacations in distant foreign countries. Over-borrowing is a potential problem. One determinant is present-biased temporal...
Chapter
Several scales for measuring attitude that have been developed are first described and evaluated. It is noted that the scales frequently fail to distinguish between opinions and attitudes and that the attitude object varies between studies. Studies of young adults’ attitudes toward borrowing are then reviewed. A majority have focused on student loa...
Chapter
In many Western countries, household indebtedness is rising to levels constituting a financial risk for individuals and a threat to financial stability. The growing household debt applies to both consumer loans and housing loans. In Sweden, which is the country that we focus on in this book, household indebtedness has over many years grown to becom...
Book
This book reviews problems with credit use and causes of indebtedness among young adults, while uncovering possibilities to encourage a healthier attitude towards loans in this segment of the population. Both consumption loans and mortgages are covered in order to adequately represent real-world credit use by young people about to enter adulthood....
Chapter
Frequent observations showing that travel influences satisfaction with life suggest that transport policy making and planning would increase society’s welfare by taking this influence into account. To do this requires detailed knowledge of how travel influences satisfaction with life. Two routes of influence have been proposed and empirically confi...
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Trust is of paramount importance to banks. Previous research has shown that trust increases with repeated personal contacts. We investigate if this applies to the customer-employee relationship in banks. Data from an on-line survey of 293 customers of Swedish retail banks are used to construct indicator measures. By means of structural equation mod...
Article
In this paper, we argue that the current focus on cycling must not neglect the need to improve public transport services for the large number of people who do not want to or are unable to cycle. An attractive public transport service is currently therefore the most important component of a sustainable transportation system. The question we address...
Chapter
In this chapter, we first address two questions: why are automobiles purchased, and why are automobiles, after being purchased, used to such a large extent? We argue that instrumental and economic factors (including time savings) play important roles. Yet, psychological factors appear to also play a decisive role. Following a brief overview of fact...
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Abstract In betting situations, if an outcome of a decision outcome is uncertain, this may counteract a possible integration of concurrent decisions. Integration here means that one add values or utilities to the outcomes that one expects. There has been proposed several possible reasons that could explain why a prior outcome is integrated. The aim...
Article
Previous research has investigated satisfaction with work commutes. We extend this research by investigating whether satisfaction with all daily travel (including work commutes, school, leisure, and shopping trips) is related to life satisfaction and emotional well-being. A random sample of 367 participants was recruited from three urban areas in S...
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We investigate whether travel mode, travel time, and activities during travel influence children’s satisfaction with their travel to school, their current mood, and their cognitive performance after arriving at school. A sample of 344 children (165 girls) between the ages of 10 and 15 years were recruited at five public schools in Värmland County,...
Chapter
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Financial literacy is shown to influence investment decisions in different ways. One possible influence is that a lack of understanding of financial risk causes a negative risk attitude with the consequence for optimal investment behaviour that the positive relation between risk and return is not properly taken into account. The authors analyse dat...
Article
We investigate whether convex incentive contracts are a source of instability of financial markets as indicated by the results of a continuous double-auction asset market experiment performed by Holmen et al. (J Econ Dyn Control 40:179–194, 2014). We develop a model to replicate the setting of the experiment and perform an agent-based simulation wh...
Article
This study addresses the question of how work commutes change positive versus negative and active versus passive mood experienced after the commutes. Analyses are presented for 230 time-sampled morning commutes to work, made by 146 randomly sampled people in three different Swedish cities, asking them to use smartphones to report mood before, direc...
Article
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an affect account that identifies emotions driving sell preferences in stock markets that result in the disposition effect (winning stocks hold too short and losing stocks too long) and to specify how stock prices are influenced. Design/methodology/approach The affect account is derived based on anal...
Chapter
This chapter describes the different methods for measuring subjective well-being. It also discusses how subjective well-being interacts with individual factors (personality, goal pursuit), economic factors (income, consumption), and social factors (relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners). Social national indicators are used to co...
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The aim of this study is to investigate whether satisfaction with grocery stores is affected by type of grocery shopping in conjunction with time pressure, and which attributes are important for satisfaction. Fictitious grocery stores are constructed according to a fractional factorial design by varying access, price level, supply quality/range, an...
Article
Limited previous research shows that travel by different modes evokes feelings. Also after-effects due to stress have been observed. Such travel-related feelings are important to consider in transport planning because of their possible consequences for travelers’ emotional well-being. A theoretical framework is proposed that makes quantitative pred...
Article
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This study examines the effects of season and weather on mood (valence and activation) and travel satisfaction (measured by the Satisfaction with Travel Scale). Analyses are presented of 562 time-sampled morning commutes to work made by 363 randomly sampled people in three different Swedish cities asking them to use smartphones to report their mood...
Article
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Events in a sequence may each be evaluated as good or bad. We propose that such good-bad evaluations evoke emotional responses that change current mood. A model of recurrent updating of current mood is developed and compared to a model of how a sequence of events evoking emotional responses is evaluated retrospectively. In Experiment 1, 149 undergr...
Article
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In an experiment we investigate preferences for allocation of a public good among group members who contributed unequally in providing the public good. Inducing the group goal of productivity resulted in preferences for equitable allocations, whereas inducing the group goals of harmony and social concern resulted in preferences for equal final outc...
Article
Performance-related bonuses are important tools for investment organizations to incentivize stock traders. Yet, two experiments indicate that bonuses rewarding short-term performance may lead to worse timing of purchases. The authors propose that hyperbolic time discounting makes participants set lower aspired purchase prices for short-term (decrea...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how trust in the sender of financial information and a narrative vs fact-related format of the information influence intentions to save in a mutual fund. Design/methodology/approach – In Experiment 1, 186 undergraduates participate and in Experiment 2, 434 Swedish citizens between 18 and 70 yea...
Chapter
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This chapter discusses how travel by different travel modes is related to primarily subjective well-being but also to health or physical well-being. Studies carried out in different geographic contexts consistently show that satisfaction with active travel modes is higher than travel by car and public transport, and that satisfaction with travel is...
Chapter
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We investigate by means of agent-based simulations the influence of convex incentives, e.g. option-like compensation, on financial markets. We propose an agent based model already developed in Fabretti et al (2015), where the model was build with the aim of studying convex contract effect using the results of a laboratory experiment performed by Ho...
Article
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Seventy-two undergraduates participating in a step-level asymmetric public good dilemma were requested to distribute the provided public good among the group members to achieve different group goals. In line with the hypotheses, economic productivity resulted in equitable allocations, harmony in equal allocations, and social concern in need-based a...
Article
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We propose that emotional well-being in everyday life is partially related to the balance of positive and negative affect associated with everyday routine activities. Factors that interfere with positive affect associated with such activities would therefore have negative impacts on emotional well-being. Supporting that time pressure is one such fa...
Article
Our aim is to investigate whether bonuses make stock portfolio managers take higher risks by diversifying less. In two experiments with undergraduates role-playing being professional investors, we test a model implying that they initially anchor on 100% allocation to one of two options delivering the largest bonus payout, then adjust towards alloca...
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Problem statement: Sometimes concurrent decisions are not integrated. Purpose of study: An experiment was conducted to investigate whether causally related options of concurrent decisions are not evaluated and therefore not chosen although their combinations are more attractive than single options. In two concurrent decisions participants chose bet...
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Purpose of Study: An experiment was conducted to investigate whether causally related outcomes of concurrent decisions are more frequently integrated than unrelated outcomes, and whether certain outcomes are more frequently integrated than uncertain outcomes. Method: Sixteen undergraduates in one group chose between buying means-end related and unr...
Article
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Problem statement: Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that the loss-sensitivity principle extends to integration of the outcomes of two concurrent risky decisions. Purpose of Study: According to this principle, only expected loss outcomes of concurrent decisions would be integrated. Method: A total of 96 undergraduates participat...
Article
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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive set of grocery store attributes that can be standardized and used in empirical research aiming at increasing retailers’ understanding of determinants of grocery store choice, and assessing how the relative importance of the attributes is affected by consumer socio-demographic charact...
Article
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This study investigates the relationship between type of grocery shopping, consumers' choice of store format and demographic characteristics. By simultaneously observing consumers' choice of store format and whether they are major or fill-in shopping, we are able to investigate more combinations of shopping types and store format than has been done...
Article
This paper uses agent-based simulation to analyze how financial markets are affected by market participants with convex incentives, e.g. option-like compensation. We document that convex incentives are associated with (i) higher prices, (ii) larger variations of prices, and (iii) larger bid-ask spreads. We conclude that convex incentives may lead t...
Article
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a narrative compared to a traditional fact-related format of financial information elicits more involved processing of such information by consumers and therefore more informed choices of retirement savings. Design/methodology/approach – A total of 394 undergraduates were recruited to t...
Book
Current transportation systems that heavily entails > rely on car and air travel are unsustainable from an environmental and health point of view, primarily owing to that > because car and air travel produces greenhouse gases contributing to global climate change as well as causes local health hazards. Transport policies aiming to reduce car and ai...
Article
We argue that people think more about the short-term individual benefits of personal motorized travel than the long-term societal costs. One explanation is that people are more concerned about their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their close relatives than the well-being of unknown others. Another explanation is that people have less knowledge...
Article
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A social-psychological perspective conceives of herding in stock markets as informative social influence resulting from heuristic or systematic information processing. In three laboratory experiments employing undergraduates we apply this perspective to investigate factors that prevent herd influence that would lead to inaccurate predictions of sto...
Article
Many fund managers, lawyers and academics assume that pension funds' legal responsibility to manage assets in the best interests of their beneficiaries (their fiduciary duty) rules out including social, ethical and environmental concerns in investments. A counter-argument is that beneficiaries' best interests can be interpreted more broadly to also...
Article
We propose a conceptual model of how time pressure affects emotional well-being associated with mundane routine activities. A selective review of research in several areas affirms the plausibility of the conceptual model, which posits negative effects on emotional well-being of insufficient time allocated to restorative and other activities instrum...
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In my commentary on the papers in this special section of European Psychologist, I note that the focus of past environmental psychology on changing the human environment to increase people’s well-being has in contemporary environmental psychology been replaced by a focus on changing people and their behavior to preserve the human environment. This...
Article
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Background. Previous studies have established a link between how people relate to their past, present, and future (i.e., time perspective) and subjective well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, positive and negative affect). Time perspective comprises five dimensions: Past Positive, Past Negative, Present Hedonistic, Present Fatalistic, and Future. Li...
Article
Introduction. - Mitigating the global climate change requires actions at different levels including that lay people change their consumption patterns, which cause emissions of greenhouse gases. Recent research suggests that inducing affects such as fear and worry may have positive effects. Objective. - To investigate whether worry in addition to pe...
Chapter
Fast motorized transportation of people and cargo is essential in contemporary societies with their specialization of functions at different locations. Cargo needs to be transported between different units in the manufacturing process as well as from manufacturers to retailers. People need to travel to and from work, shops and other locations. It i...
Chapter
We argue that the general public and politicians think more about the short-term individual benefits of travel than they think about the long-term societal costs. One explanation is that they have less knowledge of the latter than they have of the former. Another explanation is that they like people in general are more concerned about their own wel...
Article
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We conjecture that lay people extrapolate past inflation, evaluate product prices relative to recalled reference prices, and perceive income increases as opportunities to increase consumption. From these conjectures we derive the hypothesis that past inflation makes products or expenditures appear more expensive, whereas income increases make them...
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Previous research has shown that fairness, infringement on freedom, and perceived effectiveness are determinants of transport pricing acceptability. In the present study we investigate determinants of acceptability of environmental (carbon) taxation for which trust in government and environmental concern are additional determinants. Carbon taxation...
Article
The study investigates whether beliefs in professional investor skill in conjunction with trust in banks and other fund managers explain choices of options for long-term savings. From questionnaire data obtained for a population-based sample (n=178) and a sample of undergraduates (n=186), two index measures were constructed, one of beliefs in the s...
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Recent research suggests that travellers’ anticipated trip utility may differ from the utility they actually experience when making the trip. This implies that it is important to investigate not only the factors underlying trip decision making, but also the actual experience of the trip. To that end, this paper presents an empirical test of the sat...
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In general trips frequently entail several stages varying in mode, duration, and other factors. In some way travelers aggregate their satisfaction with the stages to satisfaction with the whole trip. In this paper we address the question of how this aggregation is made. We use data from a Swedish survey measuring satisfaction with commutes to and f...
Article
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Research suggests that for many people happiness is being able to make the routines of everyday life work, such that positive feelings dominate over negative feelings resulting from daily hassles. In line with this, a survey of work commuters in the three largest urban areas of Sweden show that satisfaction with the work commute contributes to over...
Article
Moderated mediation effects on attitude toward environmental policy measures of a self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence value orientation were examined in two studies. Study 1 (n = 91) showed that for policy measures incurring nontransparent personal costs, influence of value orientation on attitude is fully mediated by environmental concern, whe...
Article
In an experimental simulation employing 123 undergraduates the effect of different travel modes on satisfaction with travel, mood after the day traveled, and satisfaction with the day as a whole were assessed for the work commute by car or bus. Car was rated higher than bus on satisfaction with travel. This mode difference was accounted for by rati...
Article
Two strategies to reduce electricity production from non-renewable electricity sources are to promote households to purchase eco-labeled electricity or to reduce electricity consumption. Promoting both would be efficient unless they are negatively related. In a survey of 476 Swedish residents it is shown that intention to purchase eco-labeled elect...
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In this paper we ask whether there are differences in which attributes are important for satisfaction with grocery shopping in supermarkets compared to convenience stores. We also examine whether accessibility attributes and attractiveness attributes have different impacts on satisfaction depending on consumer characteristics and shopping behaviour...