DOI: 10.5061/dryad.j9kd51ck4
title: Strategic housing decisions and the evolution of urban settlements: Optimality modelling and empirical application in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

description: Investments in housing influence migration and landscape construction,
 making them a key component of human-environment interactions. However,
 the strategic decision-making that builds residential landscapes is an
 underdeveloped area of research in evolutionary approaches to human
 behavior. We develop a model of strategic settlement and fit it to data
 from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We construct a stochastic dynamic programming
 model to explore the trade-offs between building, moving, and saving over
 time, finding different trade-offs depending on optimisation scenarios.
 Household strategies are estimated using data on 825 households that
 settled in the Ulaanbaatar Ger districts between 1942 and 2020. The Ger
 districts are areas of self-built housing featuring both mobile dwellings
 (gers) and immobile houses (bashins). Using Approximate Bayesian
 Computation, we find the parameters of our dynamic programming model that
 best fit the empirical data. The model is able to capture the time horizon
 of housing changes and their bi-directionality, showing that moving from a
 bashin to ger can also be an optimal strategy. However, the model
 under-predicts some types of dwelling change; we discuss deviations from
 model predictions in relation to housing changes. We identify a more
 detailed exploration of risk and population mixes of strategies as key
 steps for future research.
description: The dataset is a subset of a household survey that was collected
 in Ulaanbaatar between 2019-2020. Data from the household survey have been
 anonymised and represent only the set of variables needed for the analysis
 detailed in the manuscript. For more information on methods and data
 management and cleaning procedures, see the methods section of the
 manuscript. 
description: # Strategic housing decisions and the evolution of urban settlements:
 Optimality modelling and empirical application in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j9kd51ck4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.j9kd51ck4) ## Description of the data and file structure The household survey from which these data stem was collected to address the strategic settlement decisions of residents in Ulaanbaatar's Ger districts.  The variables contained in the dataset represented a cleaned and anonymised subset of the household data, transformed specifically to interface with a theoretical model of strategic settlement decisions that is detailed in the accompanying manuscript.  The data hold information on 825 households.  ### Files and variables #### File: data\_for\_analysis\_anonym.csv **Description:** Complete data for 825 households ##### Variables * id: unique household identifier * s_state: does a household have savings? (1 = no, 2 = yes) * h_state: does a household live in a ger or bashin? (1 = ger, 2 = bashin) * l_state: does a household have tenure on the land plot they inhabit? (1 = no, 2 = yes) * f_state: does a household consist of a single person, a couple, or a family with dependents? (1 = single person, 2 = couple, 3 = family with dependents) * time_in_ub: the number of years a household has lived in Ulaanbaatar * type_trans: the type of housing transition experiences by a household (1-1 = ger-ger, 1-2 = ger-bashin, 2-1 = bashin-ger, 2-2 = bashin-bashin) ## Code/software The code necessary for reproducing the results detailed in the accompanying manuscript is available here: https://github.com/Naty-fedorova/strategic_housing_investments