Abstract
It is common for a person with several purposes to start a trip from home and return home after visiting several places. This phenomenon is called a trip chain, which is likely to occur, for instance, in leisure, sightseeing travel trips, sales, or commodity transport trips. Among others, a shopping trip chaining behavior of a consumer occurs ubiquitously in an agglomerated commercial district. We call it consumer’s shop-around or Kaiyu behavior. The apparent cause is in the district’s accumulated and proximate locations of retail facilities. Thus, the consumer’s shop-around behavior can be considered the agglomeration effect of the locational configuration of retail facilities. Hence, their actual locational arrangement can be evaluated by such a criterion as what amount of the agglomeration effect, equivalently, the consumer’s shop-around or Kaiyu behavior the arrangement induces. Based on this standpoint, this study proposes an evaluative framework for assessing retail redevelopment programs in the city center retail environment. This study develops a stationary Markov chain model with covariates to forecast consumers’ shop-around or Kaiyu behaviors. The model was applied to the city center of Fukuoka City, Japan, and used to evaluate redevelopment programs there from its forecasts. Meanwhile, this study proves the observed aggregate stationarity theorem or reproducibility theorem to show that the aggregate stationary Markov chain modeling has a rigorous validity even if any arbitrary non-stationary process rules each disaggregate process.