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

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.