A quantitative exploration of linkages across the decision stages of Residential Relocation Process

When a household decides to move from the current location, it takes bundle of decisions such as when to move, where to search, and others. We hypothise that these decisions are interlinked and may result in different decision-making trajectories. This heterogeneity in decision-making may exist due to the influence of different triggers, associated urgency, and household's attributes on spatial decisions (search criteria and search type: tenure or typology), choice of information source, search duration, and search extent which may result in varied choice set for different households. The paper aims to establish a need to determine these decision trajectories by quantitatively exploring the variation across decision dimensions. A retrospective revealed preference survey was conducted in Rajarhat Newtown and Rajarhat Gopalpur in India resulting in 272 households’ samples. The findings support the hypothesis and also suggests that variation in trigger and urgency results in the variation of search duration from 1 day to 2 years whereas variation in household's attributes reveals the selection of different search criteria and search type. The study bears an important implication on land use and transportation integration (LUTI) models by providing an alternative approach to consider dependency across decision stages dimensions of relocation process to develop the choice set formation, and location choice model.