Behavior of land developers: planning and the economics of information

Previous attempts to describe or model planning behavior have failed to focus on a decision variable for the activity of planning itself. Attempts to use economic theory to explain planning by modeling only the phenomena being planned for have not been useful in explaining or understanding planning behavior. The model developed in this paper for land development planning makes explicit the decision to plan at each stage of the development process. It also makes explicit the plan at each stage, in the form of a contingent set of expected decisions. These strict definitions make possible progress in understanding planning behavior.