Commerce districts: conditions for customer overall satisfaction in a multi-attribute framework

Extra-urban shopping malls are harming little retailers in Italian historic cities, as they do in many city centres across the world, and commercial districts are a possible way to sustain retail. The aim of the paper is to highlight what makes commercial districts located in urban centres attractive. We analyse data coming from 8 Commerce Districts of the Northern Italy Veneto Region. Data were obtained by means of a survey in which customers were asked for their satisfaction concerning specific features of a District, like parking, accessibility or feeling welcome, and their overall satisfaction about the visiting experience. We use the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) to uncover the city centre district features that are deemed more significant by visitors. The results are presented in terms of "if... then" decision rules and to analyse them we propose a new synthetic indicator (the Overall value of Condition Attribute Strength) that highlights the conditions that most influence the overall assessment of the district. The premises for a high overall evaluation of the district turn out to be related to the quality of stay in the district, while surprisingly transport and security are not.