Content area
Abstract
The residential housing materials market has unique characteristics resulting from the project based and fragmented nature of the industry. The overall goal of the research is to capture this uniqueness of the residential construction sector with regards to the innovation adoption and material usage. The dissertation is divided into three broad sections based on modeling techniques used and uses four different datasets from multiple sources for empirical estimation. The ‘repeat purchase diffusion model’ proposed in the first section of the research incorporates specific characteristics of diffusion of intermediary products. The model assumes that the product life cycle of an intermediary good is dependent on characteristics of the product and the time of introduction for later generation products. The proposed model fits the wood based panel usage data satisfactorily and provides practical demand forecasts and insights into the diffusion process of the housing materials.
The second section of the dissertation analyzes the US decking materials survey data and results are presented in three papers. The decking material usage trends provide a clear indication that engineered decking materials (e.g. plastic and composite lumbers) are steadily gaining acceptance in most market segments. Using structural equation modeling framework, the study reveals that the ‘convenience’ aspects of using synthetic decking materials are playing a pivotal role in swaying the market away from the naturally durable species. A perceptual mapping based product positioning and demand analysis tool, developed for the study, revealed that composite decking materials enjoy a favorable positioning in the market as compared to its competitors.
The research papers in the third section of the dissertation uses two different datasets. The first paper studies awareness and adoption of environmentally certified wood by residential homebuilders, using an ordinal probit (OP) approach. The second paper uses a multi-year cross-sectional data in analyzing the diffusion of innovative wall cavity insulation materials. This paper uses a zero-inflated ordinal probit (ZIOP) approach addressing the issue of high proportion of non-users in the market. The results reveal that in markets with low level of adoption, ZIOP helps better understand the role of various factors in adoption and usage decision.