The impact of risk-taking attitudes on a land use pattern: an agent-based model of residential development

One of the biggest challenges in modeling residential development involves identifying a theory-driven representation of human behavior. In this paper, an agent-based modeling experiment that tests different conceptions of risk-explicit decision making is reported upon. The decision rules used in the model are representative of risk-taking and risk-averse attitudes. The goal of this experiment is to assess spatial consequences of employing different attitude utility functions, which reflect people's simplified psychological frames of reference for land use decision making. The experiments are performed on an artificial landscape, which is being developed by competing agents equipped with several land-related objectives and utilizing various configurations of risk-bearing attitudes. The subsequent land patterns are compared using selected spatial metrics. The results suggest that an attitude toward risk may significantly influence landscape patterns. Further investigation of psychological drivers that stand behind land development decisions is suggested. Such knowledge constitutes an important step toward improving our ability to model behaviorally grounded residential location decision making.