Collective decision-making in private multi-apartment buildings: Evidence from a discrete choice experiment

This study examines how residents evaluate trade-offs between benefit scale, required engagement, and investment decision-making rules in Poland and Czechia: countries with distinct post-socialist housing trajectories. Using a large-scale discrete choice experiment with over 7,500 respondents, we analyze the relative importance of decision-making arrangements and heterogeneity in preferences across socio-demographic groups. Findings show that residents strongly prefer building-wide benefits and majority-based decision-making. Preferences show strong cross-national consistency, suggesting structural rather than context-specific patterns. Results also reveal a preference-behavior gap, interpreted through Campbell’s paradigm: although residents value direct, democratic decision-making, board-based governance, such as in housing cooperatives, may nevertheless persist because participation costs outweigh residents’ preferences for active involvement.