Browsing by Author "V. Kerry Smith, Committee Chair"

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    The Impact of Traffic Congestion on Household Behavior: Three Essays on the Role of Heterogeneity
    (2004-09-21) Davis, Alison Fara; V. Kerry Smith, Committee Chair; Daniel Phaneuf, Committee Member; Raymond Palmquist, Committee Member; Mitch Renkow, Committee Member
    Congestion is increasing everywhere from established urban areas to growth centers. The rate of increase is greater in these rapidly growing areas of the country. With the explosion of congestion in rapidly growing areas, how does congestion influence individual decision making? The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how congestion affects people's choices. More specifically, this research considers the role of observable household attributes as conditioning factors, influencing behavioral responses to congestion. This analysis is developed through three separate essays. The first essay focuses on commuting time as the outcome of joint residential and employment decisions. The framework hypothesizes that information about individual preferences for avoiding commuting time can be revealed through the differences in spatial distributions of commuting time. Two different choice margins are selected for the next two essays: a long term margin which would be associated with residential location decisions; and short term choice margins within the context of a random utility model for non-working trips. The second essay hypothesizes that expected congestion is sufficiently important to be displayed in one of a household's most important decisions, the selection of residential location. The effect of congestion can be captured with a hedonic price framework assuming that households select residential locations based on an expected mix of trips. The focus of the third essay changes to individual trips. That is, it hypothesizes household constraints will influence an individual's sensitivity to congestion as displayed through the members' decisions to make individual trips. This process is modeled using a random utility framework with careful attention to the transformation of a trip into a choice. This research provides evidence that household characteristics influence both long and short term decisions. There is support for the hypothesis that there are some household circumstances that limit the members' abilities to respond to congestion. The multiple time constraints on the activities that need to undertaken, and the discretion in when they can be undertaken in relation to other commitments, limit each individual's ability to adapt to congestion. Furthermore, this study recognizes that household circumstances are also important factors driving the distribution of commuting times.
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    Limited Attention, Asymmetric Information, and the Hedonic Model
    (2007-10-12) Pope, Jaren C.; V. Kerry Smith, Committee Chair; Walter N. Thurman, Committee Member; Daniel J. Phaneuf, Committee Member; Raymond B. Palmquist, Committee Member
    The broad objective of this research is to gauge the importance of relaxing the full information assumption in revealed preference models when decisions are made in complex, public information environments. This thesis focuses on housing markets. An information acquisition process is outlined that describes why homebuyers are often less informed than sellers for some housing attributes when they face more stringent information search and processing constraints. Adapting the hedonic model for the possibility that sellers are more informed than buyers suggests that estimates of the implicit price for a housing attribute may be attenuated towards zero if there is asymmetric information about the quantity of the attribute. The importance of the asymmetric information argument is gauged by applying the quasi-random experiment methodology to three applications involving exogenous information shocks for different housing attributes. The first of these applications describes the impact of an airport noise disclosure on housing prices. The results indicate that the disclosure reduced housing prices near the airport by 2-3 percent. This suggests that an estimate of the implicit price for airport noise would have been attenuated towards zero by approximately 36 percent prior to the disclosure. The second application described the impact of a flood plain disclosure on housing prices. The results indicate that the disclosure reduced housing prices in designated flood zones by approximately 4 percent. Thus this application reconfirms the results from the airport noise application and the conceptual framework. The third application describes the impact of information shocks related to the locations of registered sex offenders on housing prices. The results indicate that housing prices fall by 2 percent within one tenth of a mile of a registered sex offender when a sex offender moves into a neighborhood. However, this impact was not affected by increased media attention surrounding two child-abductions committed by registered sex offenders near the study area. These results are somewhat less conclusive about the role of asymmetric information on the estimated implicit price for proximity to sex offenders.
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    Recovering Preferences for Public Goods from a Dual-Market Locational Equilibrium
    (2007-10-04) Kuminoff, Nicolai V.; V. Kerry Smith, Committee Chair