Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	711
Event Title:	Innovations in Activity and Travel Behavior
Event Date:	Jan 25 2012 8:30AM- 10:15AM
Event Location:	Hilton, International Center
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Behavioral Housing Search Choice Set Formation: Spatial Hazard-Based Screening Model (12-1172)

Residential location search has been an interesting topic to both practitioners and researchers. The housing search process starts with an alternative formation and screening practice. At this level households evaluate all potential alternatives based on their lifestyle, preferences, and utilities to form a manageable choice set with limited number of plausible alternatives. This paper attempts to study this screening and filtering practice in more details and to develop a modeling framework that can replicate this process. The average desired work distance is considered as the potential attributes examined by the household to evaluate feasible housing alternatives. It is postulated that alternatives will be included in the choice set only if the average work distance satisfies the household distance threshold. This paper explores the viability of using proportional hazard models to housing search process. Some of the specifications of hazard-based model that are typically used on temporal data are examined on average work distance data. Several household socio-demographic attributes from eight waves of the Puget Sound Transportation Panel (PSTP) were utilized for model estimation along with built environment variables, characteristics of the supply side of the market, and several other economic indicators. The approach presented in the paper provides a remedy for the large choice set problem typically faced in discrete choice modeling.

Authors
     Hossein Rashidi, Taha , University of Toronto, Canada
     Mohammadian, Abolfazl , University of Illinois, Chicago