Fedorova Natalia, Kandler Anne, McElreath Richard
Department of Human Behaviour, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
R Soc Open Sci. 2024 Oct 30;11(10):241415. doi: 10.1098/rsos.241415. eCollection 2024 Oct.
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 behaviour. Our contribution to this literature is a theoretical model and an empirical test of this model using data from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We develop a model of strategic housing decisions using stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) to explore the trade-offs between building, moving and saving over time, finding different trade-offs depending on optimization scenarios and housing costs. Household strategies are then estimated using data on 825 households that settled in the Ger districts of Ulaanbaatar between 1942 and 2020. The Ger districts are areas of self-built housing that feature both mobile dwellings (gers) and immobile houses (bashins). Using approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), 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 fixed to mobile dwelling can also be an optimal strategy. However, the model underpredicts household persistence in dwelling types. We discuss deviations from model predictions and identify a more detailed exploration of risk and population mixes of strategies as key steps for future research.
对住房的投资影响着人口迁移和景观建设，使其成为人类与环境相互作用的关键组成部分。然而，构建居住景观的战略决策在人类行为进化方法的研究领域尚不完善。我们对这一文献的贡献是一个理论模型以及使用来自蒙古乌兰巴托的数据对该模型进行的实证检验。我们使用随机动态规划（SDP）开发了一个战略住房决策模型，以探索随着时间推移在建造、迁移和储蓄之间的权衡，根据优化方案和住房成本发现不同的权衡。然后，使用1942年至2020年间定居在乌兰巴托蒙古包区的825户家庭的数据来估计家庭策略。蒙古包区是自建住房区域，既有移动住宅（蒙古包）也有固定房屋（巴辛）。使用近似贝叶斯计算（ABC），我们找到了最符合实证数据的动态规划模型参数。该模型能够捕捉住房变化的时间跨度及其双向性，表明从固定住宅搬到移动住宅也可能是一种最优策略。然而，该模型低估了家庭在居住类型上的持续性。我们讨论了与模型预测的偏差，并确定对风险和策略的人口组合进行更详细的探索是未来研究的关键步骤。
