Modeling household housing and car ownership decisions: a group decision-based time allocation approach

ABSTRACT

Multitudes of household long-term decisions and daily activity-travel decisions are interdependent and bound together in some ways. This paper develops an integrated model that links long-term decisions like housing, vehicle ownership and short-term activity-travel decisions like time allocation to activity participation, so as to examine the interactions between long-terms decisions (in terms of expenditure tradeoff), as well as investigate household housing and car ownership decisions from the perspective of time allocation. A group decision approach is adopted to differentiate household members’ relative influence on consensual decision-making and capture intra-household interactions. The proposed model is applied to an empirical case study in Beijing to calibrate the parameters, demonstrate its applicability and analyze household members’ interactive decision-making on housing, car ownership and time use over in-home and out-of-home activities. This study will be helpful for gaining a deep understanding of spatial distribution of households, household car ownership levels and individuals’ activity-travel patterns.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing
• car ownership
• time allocation
• group decision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Information source: National Bureau of Statistics of China. http://www.stats.gov.cn/.

2 For a broader review of research on LUTI modeling, interested readers can refer to Timmermans et al. (2003), Hunt,Kriger, and Miller (2005), Chiappori et al. (2006), Waddell (2011), Li, Li, and Lam (2014) and Acheampong and Silva (2015).

3 We use this simple way of calculation to avoid the developed model being too complicated and intractable, and it is suitable for cities with strong monocentric characteristics, such as Beijing. Admittedly, it is worthwhile to explore other ways of calculating housing expenditure with more attributes included.

4 As can be noted from Appendix A2, the optimal time allocation solution obtained from the second stage model is a function of travel time, while travel time is a function of housing and car ownership choices (as expressed by Equations (7) and (8)); therefore, the optimal time allocation solution should be a composite function of housing and car ownership choices.

5 Information source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing.

6 A sample size of 209 households is relatively small for the proposed model. It can help to demonstrate the application of proposed model in real situations, but it is worthwhile to test the proposed model in larger samples.

7 The hukou system is the household registration system in China designed not only to provide population statistics and identify personal status, but also act as an important social control for regulating population mobility. It affects people’s access and entitlement to government-provided benefits and opportunities, including housing, employment, car ownership, education, etc.