Strategic housing decisions and the evolution of urban settlements: Optimality modelling and empirical application in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

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 horizo..., 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. , , # 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 ...,