Three Essays In Residential Locations, Household Commuting Patterns, And Spatial N-Person Prisoner’S Dilemma: The Case Study Of Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which explores urban-related issues-built environment, residential locations, and transportation behaviors-in Bangkok, Thailand. The research highlights different analytical methods in regional science and aims to advance the knowledge empirically, methodologically, and theoretically. The first chapter provides an empirical contribution by analyzing the residential locations of the creative class in Bangkok. The creative class literature is premised on the location calculus of innovative individuals that contrast sharply with the rest of the population. Yet few empirical studies have tested the creative class hypothesis-the proclivity of creative people to gravitate toward locations that offer certain built amenities. In the case of Bangkok, the pattern of residential locations of creative households is found to be significantly different from that of common ones, and the built environments that attract creative households are mass transit stations, shopping malls, and public parks. The second chapter develops a method to forecast household travel mode choice and trip sharing behavior using household socio-economic survey, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and trip table data. It demonstrate how standard household survey data that are not specifically designed for use in a modal split model can be used to forecast household travel mode choice and estimate ridership for a mass transit mode. The forecast also reveals that households are more likely to share their trips when the first traveler is male or when there are school children. The third chapter develops a theoretical framework to analyze traffic congestion from micro-behavioral foundation. This paper extends the evolution of an n-person prisoner's dilemma within actual geographical space, integrating an agentbased model with GIS, in conflicting spatial interactions that ultimately lead to the emergence of cooperation. The spatial agent-based model captures the response strategies of autonomous individuals in a landscape that contextualizes both the natural and the built environment. This theoretical framework thus serves as a basis for the analysis of collective strategic decisions on the use of a common resource from a game theoretical perspective