Socioeconomic Moderation of Complementarity and Intervening Opportunities in Shopping Ride-Hailing Flows: Evidence from Chengdu, China

Functional complementarity between residential and commercial functions explains inter-zonal shopping flows, yet commerce is typically treated as a single category and the intervening-opportunity pillar of spatial interaction theory is left empirically dormant. We develop a spatial interaction model that partitions commercial supply into non-daily and daily tiers, recasts the competing-destinations (CD) operator as a directional, kernel-weighted detour-cost term, and embeds origin-community socioeconomic status (SES) as a multiplicative moderator of complementarity, competing destinations, and distance impedance. Estimated by Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood on 1668 Chengdu communities and shopping ride-hailing trips, the model yields three findings. First, SES moderates Spatial Function Complementarity in opposite directions across tiers: high-SES communities respond more strongly to non-daily complementarity, whereas the negative daily-tier effect is weaker among low-SES communities. Second, competing destinations act as an agglomeration signal rather than a flow-diverter, with high-SES communities responding more strongly. Third, network distance was significantly and negatively associated with shopping ride-hailing flows, whereas its interaction with origin-community SES was not statistically significant. These findings show that consumption frequency and directional commercial structure help explain socioeconomic heterogeneity in shopping ride-hailing flows.