VOGON Research Award for Ingrid Janssen

Ingrid Janssen, Associate Professor at TIAS, has been awarded the VOGON Research Award this year.

Each year, VOGON (Vereniging voor Vastgoed Onderzoekers Nederland), the association for real estate researchers in the Netherlands, assesses the quality of the real estate research published. A prominent jury assesses the research on the extent to which it is innovative; the extent to which it uses new empirical data; scientific competence and fit with relevant scientific literature; social impact and legibility.

This year, VOGON has evaluated more than one hundred publications from nine trade journals. The first prize was awarded to the work of Ingrid Janssen (TIAS), Pauline van den Berg (TU/e), and Aloys Borgers (TU/e). That work is an extensive study of the experience qualities of inner-city shopping areas. A short passage from the jury's report can be found hereafter. A link to the article has been included at the bottom of the text.   

"This study is relevant, as the position of Dutch inner-city shopping areas is increasingly strained. One of the symptoms of that strain is a rising number of vacant properties. The question foremost on our minds is how can those shopping areas be made appealing once again. One of the more evident approaches is to target visual experience qualities, or in layman's terms: the Christmas lights in the city center.The research is based on a large-scale consumer survey of more than two thousand respondents. The results of this survey were then subjected to three different techniques of statistical analysis to be able to interpret those results: a ‘decision tree analysis’, a ‘path analysis’, and ‘discrete choice modeling’.

The research naturally gains validity when the outcomes of the three analyses confirm each other. The authors are honest about their findings: the outcomes of the analyses coincide only partially with each other. The article shows that only a limited number of qualities have an impact on the amenity value. This is useful information for a manager of a shopping center. It turns out that both the physical and environmental attributes have an impact on the experience, but that impact is largely exceeded by the impact of the range of shopping options."

"Belevingskenmerken van binnenstedelijke winkelgebieden" (Experience qualities of inner-city shopping areas) was written by Ingrid Janssen of TIAS, Pauline van den Berg and Aloys Borgers of TU Eindhoven. You can read it here.