Disaggregate behavioural land use modelling: Integration of housing search, job search and households' dynamics

The urban planning process, which is essential in developing sustainable infrastructure for the future, is reliant on modelling tools to appropriately assess current conditions whilst providing an accurate estimation for future. In the context of housing infrastructure management, modelling approaches used in practice estimate housing demand at aggregate levels, which is then used for assessing government policies in housing market; while disaggregate and behavioural models are more common in research. Although disaggregate models are more realistic, they are more challenging to develop. This is because households’ decision on housing relocation, which directly impacts housing consumption, is a compound decision. The motivation for changing living place comes from the dissatisfaction associated with the current occupied dwelling. Households then decide about their tenure status, select their next dwelling and plan their move. These decisions are often made jointly, rather than in a sequential manner. Furthermore, households are typically consisted of several individuals who have their own preferences and constraints. This is while residential relocation decision is collectively made and its consequences will affect all household members. Accordingly, traditional housing search studies cannot appropriately account for the joint characteristic of the decisions related to residential relocation process, or the group decision making mechanism. This thesis presents an investigation into household members’ behaviour with regards to the housing search process. In the first part, this research investigates the impact of some unexplored parameters on the housing search process. In specific, future anticipation, mutual impact from life-course events and financial risk attitudes are studied in the first part of this research practice. Initially, the impact of households’ future tenure choice on the timing of relocation is investigated. The postulated hypothesis in this part is that in addition to current socio-demographic attributes, households’ anticipation about the future affects residential relocation decision. Then the mutual relationship between life-course events is investigated. Residential relocation is considered as one of the life-course events which affects and is affected by other life-course events such as job relocation. This research puts forward a model specification which addresses job relocation and residential relocation simultaneously. Thereafter, the impact of unobservable variables, such as risk attitudes on residential relocation is studied. The second part of this research is focused on model stability concept and group decision making mechanism. This part starts with a discussion on how the common practice of subset selection in discrete choice models often results in an unstable model. In this part, instability, as a potential cause of prediction bias in discrete choice modelling is discussed and bagging method as a potential treatment is introduced. Besides, decisions in the process of housing search are made collectively by all household members. To address this concept, household members’ negotiation in changing their commute distance and their interaction in making residential location choice is then modelled in this study. The core contribution of this research practice is to develop a comprehensive modelling framework that can account for behavioural aspects and household members’ interactions with regards to housing search decisions. This thesis provides the foundation for the development of practical tools that are capable of assessing the consequences of major decisions in housing market for the society.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Ghasrikhouzani, Milad

• Survival Analysis
• Land Use
• Transport Planning
• Behavioural Modelling

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/21121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/61689