Abstract

When looking for a new place to stay, people can rarely realize their preferences. The set of available housing options, individual means and discriminatory behavior of landlords narrow their opportunity set to what is available and affordable. In addition, past and present living conditions, for example, a neighborhood’s social and ethnic composition or interactions with neighbors, shape people’s experiences and residential preferences, making the latter endogenous and subject to contextual influences.

Using a discrete choice experiment, implemented in a large, representative survey in Switzerland, we examine how people balance – among other things – different contextual characteristics of housing alternatives (e.g., social and ethnic composition of the neighborhood, local social network, distance to school and work). Geocoding the data further allows us to examine to which extent people’s preferences are spatially and socially interdependent, and how they are linked to presently experienced neighborhood relations and conditions.

Biography

Christoph is sociologist with an additional degree in mathematical statistics, primarily interested in the modeling of people’s decision making in various contexts. Everyday interactions with friends, family or neighbors, peers in schools or colleagues at work as well as the resources we mobilize through such networks: they all influence our own views and decisions. In this vein, he conducted several research projects on neighborhood and other contextual and compositional effects.

Please find below his most recent publications:

• Zangger, C. 2024. Assessing Student Preferences for Quantitative Methods Courses Using Discrete Choice Experiments. Teaching Sociology, Online First (This paper provides a hands on introduction to the design of DCEs).
• Zangger, C. & A. Bank. 2024. The Mediating Role of Neighborhood Networks on Long-Term Trajectories of Subjective Well-Being After Covid-19. Social Inclusion, 12 (8426).
• Zangger, C. & F. Roncaglioni. 2023. Using webscraped, geocoded online transactions to analyze socio-economic segregation (Working Paper).
• Zangger, C. 2023. Localized social capital in action: How neighborhood relations buffered the negative impact of COVID-19 on subjective well-being and trust. Social Science & Medicine – Population Health, 21 (101307).
• Zangger, C. 2023. Is Non-response Contagious? The Use of Spatial Information for Predicting and Weighting Survey Nonresponse. SocArXiv. osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/kdr7h
• Zangger, C. 2021. Choosing the right place? An experimental examination of ethnic preferences in housing decisions. Housing Studies, Online First.
• Zangger, C. 2019. Making a place for space. Using spatial econometrics to model social mechanisms in neighborhood effect studies. Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 41 (8): 1055–1080.