2: Propositions for Modelling Household Decision-Making

This paper is an attempt to think through a unified theory/model of household and household member decision-making. Ideally, this model covers the gamut of decisions of interest within an integrated land use, transportation, environment (ILUTE) type of comprehensive urban simulation model, from “long-run” residential and employment location choice to “short-run” activity/travel decisions within an individual day or week.

The focus of this paper is conceptual; that is, the objective is to sketch out a conceptual theory/model of household decision-making. While it is hoped that this conceptual model is, in fact, practical to implement (and, indeed, a simplified prototype has been developed, see Miller et al. (2002, 2005); Miller and Roorda (2003) and Roorda et al. (2005)), the intent is not to deal with implementation-level details. Rather, the hope is to describe the overall structure of such a model in sufficient detail to assess its potential as a framework for the development of improved models of household decision-making. In particular, the paper is concerned with developing consistent, explicit and comprehensive semantics characterizing the problem of household decision-making, along with detailing the overall processes that control and shape these decisions.