Transport buyers choice of transport service – A literature review of empirical results Jonas Flodén ⁎, Fredrik Bärthel, Edith Sorkina Department of Business Administration, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden 1. Introduction Understanding the choice of transport service is a key issue in under- standing the transport market, designing a competitive transport sys- tem and, in particular, achieving a shift towards intermodal transport. The selection of transport service has received increased interest in re- cent years, particularly in relation to the increased focus on intermodal transport, caused by large political focus on reducing the dominance of road transport and thus leading to subsequent large research attention to intermodality (cf. Bontekoning, Macharis, & Trip, 2004; European Commission, 2001). To recognize the challenges in attracting freight to intermodal transport and to design a competitive transport system in general, it is of key importance to identify which factors are important to the customer. A core component in intermodal research is thus to study the modal split and competition between transport modes. The modal choice is a decision made based on the combined performance of a number of factors, such as price and quality, where the different ac- tors have different values, perceptions, and criteria for the selection of transport solutions (Woxenius & Bärthel, 2008). To understand the modal choice thus requires an understanding of the underlying factors. This knowledge is not only important for industry actors in designing competitive transport solutions, but also for society in help building and supporting an efficient transport system. Policymakers in particular have a keen interest in understanding the challenges and opportunities associated with the different modes of transport and potential transport services. Consequently, choice of transport service has received large interest in the research community and several studies have been conducted. However, the studies show disparate results to some extent and have been conducted in different settings, with different focus and using dif- ferent methods. Thus, there is a need to summarise and compare these different studies to gain a better understanding of the factors influenc- ing the choice of transport service. The purpose of this paper is to make a literature review and compar- ison of previous studies on the transport service choice for freight and to identify important factors behind the choice. Implications for intermodal transport will be considered in particular. What separates this literature review from previous reviews (e.g., Meixell & Norbis, 2008 and Karlsson, 2008) is a focus on the actual mapping of real cus- tomer attitudes and preferences and a widened scope, which includes non-peer reviewed sources. Implications for business and management include a better knowledge of customer demands, which could help managers design more competitive transport systems. The review focuses on peer-reviewed European studies during the last 26 years, from 1990 to 2016, published in English and Swedish. The peer-reviewed studies are complemented by non-peer review pub- lications, or the so-called “grey literature” of reports and on-line publi- cations. Today, much research is only published outside the traditional academic channels and to completely ignore this research bears the risk of missing relevant studies (White, 2014; Woxenius, 2015). How- ever, it is important to recognize the potential difference in research quality between these groups and to keep them separate when analysing the data. Publications in Swedish were selected since the au- thors are Swedish and are familiar with possible publication sources. The review includes studies on European conditions based on pri- mary data. Thus, it is a requirement that the study has made some kind of empirical data collection where the actual opinion of the trans- port customer has been studied. It does not include modelling ap- proaches or analyses based on statistical data. Cases studies were also excluded. To only include studies that have directly collected data from the transport customer is likely to come closest to revealing the real influencing factors. The paper starts with an introduction, followed by a methodology section, after which the review results are presented. This is followed by analysis and conclusions. 2. Methodology A four-step approach was applied for the literature review. Firstly, a large scientific database was used to find peer-reviewed journal publi- cations. Science Direct, one of the largest databases covering more than 12 million articles, was used. A list of relevant actors and activities were identified by the authors and used in the search in all fields in the database. The actors identified included shippers, forwarders, carriers, transport customers, hauliers, transport service providers, logistics ser- vice providers, consignors, and consignees. The activities identified were selection, perception, preferences, and behaviour/behavior. Each Research in Transportation Business & Management xxx (2017) xxx–xxx ⁎ Corresponding author at: School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 610, 40530 Gothenburg, Sweden. E-mail address: jonas.floden@handels.gu.se (J. Flodén). RTBM-00276; No of Pages 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rtbm.2017.02.001 2210-5395/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Research in Transportation Business & Management Please cite this article as: Flodén, J., et al., Transport buyers choice of transport service – A literature review of empirical results, Research in Trans- portation Business & Management (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rtbm.2017.02.001