Residential Location Choice Models

Residential location choice is a fundamental process determining real-estate dynamics, regional development, and spatiotemporal traffic flows. Interest in residential choice modeling spans over half a century of extensive research in regional science, urban economics, and transportation. Following the theoretical foundation of the bid-rent curve, practical needs of simulating urban dynamics have led to household-based utilitarian specification on the basis of microeconomics.

Today's residential location choice modeling capacity includes the representation of multiple-earner households, spatial correlation between alternatives, extensively large choice sets, population heterogeneity, joint decisions, and extensively large choice sets. This entry outlines the theoretical foundation of residential choice modeling, surveys current modeling practices, discusses implementation in agent-based models, and offers new research directions.

This article discusses the definition of the residential choice bundle, choice set and the decision-maker unit, compensatory and noncompensatory decision rules, joint decisions, population strata, and data sources. New research directions refer to online data sources, shared economy, soft amenities and lifestyle, attitudes, and norms..