Mobility experience and mobility decision‐making: An experiment on permanent migration and residential multilocality

Abstract

Summary In the course of increasing labour market flexibility, more complex forms of circular mobility, such as residential multilocality, have evolved. A life course approach may help understand moving intentions and moving behaviours across the life span. However, the dependencies between various phases of circular residential mobility in individual biographies have been under‐explored. Applying a general cost–benefit approach, we assume that a previous experience with circular mobility may help reduce uncertainties in decision‐making on subsequent residential mobility, and may strengthen specific mobility dispositions. A factorial survey experiment was employed to analyse whether and how the prior experience with residential multilocality affects subsequent decision‐making on permanent migration and residential multilocality. A sample of academic staff of a university for science and technology in Switzerland (ETH Zurich) received hypothetical job offers in order to measure their mobility intentions. Results show that, on receiving a sufficiently beneficial job offer, multilocality is slightly favoured by respondents having experience in this kind of mobility. Migration costs impede migration intentions and encourage intentions for multilocality. The assessment of the transition costs varies and housing costs play a minor role. When considering multilocal living, respondents with and without experience with residential multilocality exhibited substantial differences in how transition and housing costs are evaluated. This was not the case, however, when they considered migrating.

Attracting and retaining expatriates in Qatar during an era of uncertainty: Would you stay or would you go?

“…Second, how do high‐income, high‐skilled expatriates, presumably with greater social and spatial mobility, respond to competing scenarios and offers in new locations? One avenue for doing this would be to undertake a web implementation utilising a factorial survey design of the type recently published in this journal (Petzold, ). Beyond migration in the Middle East, population research should engage experimental methods to model how people make choices in the face of economic and political uncertainty.…”

Migration, Commuting, or a Second Home? Insights from an Experiment Among Academics

“…This basic idea has been transferred to decision-making on different types of mobility by several authors (cf. Alonso 1964;Yapa et al 1971;Vickerman 1984;Green et al 1999;Romaní et al 2003;Abraham et al 2010;Abraham and Nisic 2012;Huber and Nowotny 2013;Bähr and Abraham 2016;Petzold 2017).…”

“…Originally developed to study beliefs and judgments in social justice (Rossi 1979;Jasso 2006), factorial survey experiments have recently been applied to study decision-making on regional mobility Schönholzer 2009, 2012;Abraham et al 2010;Abraham and Nisic 2012;Bähr and Abraham 2016;Petzold 2017). However, most of these studies primarily focussed on bargaining strategies of coupled partners when negotiating decisions on migration (Abraham et al 2010;Bähr and Abraham 2016) or on migration versus commuting Schönholzer 2009, 2012;Abraham and Nisic 2012).…”

“…However, not much attention is paid to different types of mobility. In particular, daily commuting and establishing a second home have not been distinguished so far (see Petzold 2017).…”

Residential Mobility and Quality of Life between Metropolitan Areas: The Case of South Korea

“…With increased data availability, macrolevel research on urban informatics has progressed, along with research on residential mobility at the individual household level. For example, from an urban informatics perspective, residential mobility has been studied in terms of housing equity and the labor market [3], while the labor-market perspective has expanded to focus on job-related residential mobility in tandem with industrialization processes [4]. Meanwhile, research on individual household-level residential mobility has found that residential satisfaction affects mobility [5], and factors such as the neighborhood quality, including the housing quality, are important determinants of household movement [6].…”