Generation Y’s Information Needs Concerning Sharing Rides in Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Starting with abstract I like the idea of the research. The first aspect with a negative impact was the reduced number of participants (154). The statistic analyses was well done. The test was well presented in paper and the discussions was good.

My suggestions for authors is to improve the paper with a more clearly objective. A research in this domain can be required but the paper must have a clearly objective.

Also the conclusions components must be improved with the result obtained from research made.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We are thankful for your helpful suggestions. 

We revised the introduction and the literature review. Please see 1.1 and 1.2. We also sharpened our research objectives and added a schematic representation. For this purpose, please see chapter 1.3.

Accordingly, we revised the discussion section to carve out the objectives of the study and the conclusions that can be drawn. We did this by providing answers to the research questions RQ1-RQ4 in the discussion. Please see chapter 4.1.

We hope, you find the manuscript in a good shape now.

Reviewer 2 Report

This study is designed to assess the effect of covariates on the willingness to share rides with fellow travellers in shared autonomous mobility on demand systems. Mainly, travel time, degree of vehicle automation, quality of information on fellow passengers (e.g. picture, name, or rating) and gender of the fellow passenger are considered as the potential covariate to decide willingness. The discussion made on the descriptive statistics and further relations is explored through Generalized Linear Mixed Models. The paper is well-written, and the outcomes of this research are significant. Before the final acceptance, kindly consider the following points in the revised manuscript.

1. What is generation Y. Please add definition.
2. Please use Table instead of table whenever you are citing a table.
3. It is unclear that why the authors specifically choose Generalized Linear Mixed Models for the analysis purpose? Are the assumptions are fulfilled?
4. There is a need to provide the reason that why Model 2 (interaction model) is required. What they have learned from Model 2, and how the results are different from Model 1?
5. Generally, ANOVA is used to compare more than two means. However, the authors used ANOVA to compare the means of male and female. Is ANOVA is the appropriate test for this case?
6. Usually, the ANOVA test is applied when the population is normally distributed. Please provide evidence of the normality.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

 

We are thankful for your helpful suggestions. We revised the paper according to your suggestions. 

We added a definition of Generation Y to the chapter 1.3 „research objectives“. We changed the citing style of tables in the text.

We followed your suggestion and explained why a Generalized Linear Model was chosen.

We also followed your valuable suggestion to add a more detailed interpretation of the interaction model and a comparison to the model without interaction. We did this for both regression analysis.

With regard to your remark on the ANOVA, we agree that ANOVA, in contrast to t-test, is used for comparing the variances of two or more groups. However, an ANOVA with repeated measures was chosen due to the structure of the data (16 choice sets). The assumptions of ANOVA (homogenity of variance, indepencence and normality) were tested before performing the analyis. The Levene’s tests for all calculations were not significant, meaning that the assumption of homogenity of variance were not violated. With regard to  normality, the data violated the assumption. However, for a group size > 25, the assumption of normality is not necessary and when group sizes are equal the F-statistic can be quite robust to violations of normality (Wilcox, 2005).

We hope, you find the manuscript in a good shape now.

Reviewer 3 Report

An initial preamble on shared mobility and autonomous vehicles should be introduced in the abstract.
In the introduction, more references to the evolution of shared and autonomous mobility and finally to the combined autonomous-combined service should be included.
Therefore the following works are recommended 
1)Arena, F., Pau, G., & Collotta, M. (2018). A survey on driverless vehicles: From their diffusion to security. J. Internet Serv. Inf. Secur, 8, 1-19.
2)Tesoriere, G., & Campisi, T. (2020, July). The benefit of engage the “Crowd” encouraging a bottom-up approach for shared mobility rating. In International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications (pp. 836-850). Springer, Cham.
3) Dandl, F., Hyland, M., Bogenberger, K., & Mahmassani, H. S. (2019). Evaluating the impact of spatio-temporal demand forecast aggregation on the operational performance of shared autonomous mobility fleets. Transportation, 46(6), 1975-1996.

In the introduction, a flow chart might make it easier to understand the steps of the investigation conducted

The title of table 2 needs to be changed to include the various components examined as a legend. 

A more detailed description of the method of data acquisition for the sample examined should be provided, justifying the choice of variables analysed. 

More explanation is needed to accompany figure 6, which should also be inserted in high resolution for better viewing by the reader. 

Paragraph 1.3 could be summarised by means of a flow chart or graph. 

It is necessary to describe the limitations of the research and future research steps

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

We found your suggestions very helpful and appreciate your efforts. We revised the masuscript.

We followed your suggestions and added an introductory sentence regaring shared autonomous driving. Please see the abstract.

We revised the introduction and added more details to the evolution of shared and autonomous mobility. We included two of the three recommended references .

We appreciate your suggestions for a flowchart. We decided to add a schematic representation of the research questions to the end of the introduction section.

We specified the titel of Table 2 and moved the legend tot he bottom oft he table.

Regarding the method description, we tried tob e more concrete. However, I am not sure whether I interepreted your remark correctly. Could you please specify the information that is lacking in your view?

We provided more information to Figure & (now 7) regarding the cumulative distribution and provided a figur with higher solution.

Paragraphs 1.3 now ends with a schematic representation oft he research objectives.

There is an entire chapter that is dedicated to Limitations and further research needs. Please see 4.2.

We hope, you find the manuscript in a good shape now.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors for their excellent work. They have made a very detailed revision and convinced me with good arguments. 

Author Response

We are very pleased that you find the paper in a good shape after our revisions. Thank you for your support in publishing the paper.

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript still contains numerous typos and grammatical errors.
Figure 1 is not very visible, please insert the text in a larger format

To complete the concept of the development of autonomous vehicles and smart cities, we recommend reading this recent work 

1) Campisi, T., Severino, A., Al-Rashid, M. A., & Pau, G. (2021). The Development of the Smart Cities in the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) Era: From Mobility Patterns to Scaling in Cities. Infrastructures, 6(7), 100.

Probably the presence of colour graphs in figures 4 5 and partially 6 could exemplify the reading of the results shown.

Check the formatting of the notes accompanying Table 2 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we appreciate your renewed efforts in improving the manuscript. We checked the paper for typos and grammatical errors as proposed by you. 

Thanks for the reference. We added the paper by Campisi et al. to the section regarding the evolution of autonomous vehicles and the differentiation between shared and private schemes. 

We added Fig. 1 in a higher resolution. However, we decided against changing the bacl and white figures to colour, because we think it would not increase readability.  

We checked the formating of the tables and the description of the tables.

Thanks again for your support in publishing the manuscript.