Designing an Efficient Stated Ranking Experiment for Ex Ante Urban Freight Policy Evaluation in a Three Agent Type Context: Retailers, Own-Account and Carrier

City logistic policy making requires an understanding of specific issues seldom investigated in current research. Policy implementation produces unsatisfactory results when does not consider behavioural and contextual aspects. Acquiring relevant data is crucial to test hypotheses and forecast agents’ reactions. Development and application of appropriate survey instruments to test policy ex-ante acceptability is still lacking despite methodological advances in modelling interactive behaviour. This paper expands and innovates the methodological literature by describing a stated ranking experiment to study freight agent interactive behaviour and discusses in detail the efficient experimental design implemented to incorporate agent specific interaction in city logistic literature