1、本科毕业设计（论文） 外 文 翻 译 Individual Agents, Firms, and the Real Estate Brokerage Process Introduction This study examines how individual agents affect house selling prices and time on the market while controlling for brokerage firm-specific effects as well as supply and demand conditions that vary by neig
2、hborhood. The existing theoretical and empirical research on real estate brokerage tends to blur the distinction between the firm and individual agents within firms. As a consequence, the empirical literature studying the housing market-broker nexus deals primarily with identifying firm level effect
3、s in real estate transactions and the growing stock of empirical evidence offers only limited insight into how individual agent characteristics or strategies affect sales outcomes. This study examines the effects of agents unique skills and revealed strategies in the market as reflected in various d
4、egrees of agent specialization by function (e.g.,listing, selling, and partnering) or by geographic area. This paper extends the model developed in Turnbull and Dombrow (2006) to study individual agent effects on transaction outcomes. The framework controls for localized demand and supply conditions
5、 surrounding the house being sold, which allows us to separate the effects of localized market conditions from the effects of agent specialization across locations on prices and marketing times. In addition, this approach models both selling price and marketing time as endogenous in the search/match
6、ing process, which enables us to pick up the separate effects of firms and agents on both house sales price and sales time. Using transaction data covering a 2-year period in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we find that firm size effects on selling price disappear once firm specialization and agent characte
7、ristics are taken into account. Geographic concentration by firms leads to higher selling prices. Houses listed and sold by different agents in the same firm sell for less. For individual agents, neither sex nor selling own listings affects price or selling time, but there are significant gains from
8、 partnering transactions across firms. Agents who specialize in listing properties obtain higher prices for their sellers while those who specialize in selling obtain lower prices for their buyers. Houses nearer to other transactions of an agent sell for higher prices. Finally, greater scale of list
9、ing and selling activity by an agent tends to lower selling price or lengthen the time on the market. The paper is organized as follows. Agents and the Sales Process discusses existing empirical evidence as it relates to agents roles in the sales process, emphasizing that different agents may have c
10、omparative advantages in different phases of the transaction sequence and may therefore find it beneficial to specialize their functions to some degree. The Empirical Model explains the empirical model, the variables and their interpretation for firm and agent effects. Empirical Analysis describes t
11、he data set and discusses the empirical results. The last section concludes. Agents and the Sales Process We can conceptually partition the transaction process into the listing, search and matching, negotiation, and closing phases. Doing so emphasizes that individual agents may have incentives to in
12、vest more heavily in certain skills that apply most readily to a subset of phases in the transaction sequence, a strategy adopted by a significant number of agents. The theoretical models that address listing activities typically depict this phase as a matching process, where agents expend effort co
13、mpeting with each other to obtainlistings from the pool of potential sellers (Williams 1998； Yinger 1981). Williams (1998) depicts agent effort spent in this type of matching as unproductive competition among homogeneous agents. He also notes, however, that agent effort expended to obtain listings m
14、ay increase market efficiency when agents and sellers are heterogeneous. Survey data are consistent with the latter view, revealing that sellers are drawn to brokerage firms with good reputations and agents who exhibit a solid knowledge of the market and with whom the sellers feel comfortable (Johns
15、on et al. 1988). But obtaining a listing is more than a matching process, since the agent who ends up winning the listing will have already set the stage by influencing the sellers asking price, reservation price, and view of market conditions. The theoretical and empirical literatures tend to focus
16、 on the search phase of the transaction process in which sellers are matched with buyers (Williams 1998； Wu and Colwell 1986； Yavas 1992, 1996； Yinger 1981). A popular perspective of agent activity in the academic literature envisions a house seller whose agent matches the seller with a buyer from t
17、he population of potential buyers for a house, typically by influencing the sellers asking price (Salant 1991). At the same time, we can also view the agent engaged with a buyerwhether a formal buyers agent or a traditional sellers agentas assisting the buyer with their search, matching the buyer wi
18、th a house from the population of available houses (Baryla and Zumpano 1995). In either case, we expect that different skills or information expertise are helpful in the search/matching phase when compared with the listing phase. If so, then we expect to see agents with strong comparative advantages
19、 in the market emphasize the function(s) in which they hold the advantage. In this view, brokerage firms can be thought of as portfolios of individual agents with differing skills so that, even though individual agents may specialize in listing or selling, there is no need to expect firms to special
20、ize in these functions to the same extent. The negotiation phase of the transaction process is where some of the more subtle aspects of the agents efforts in cultivating the seller in the listing phase can affect the outcome. The agent can influence the sellers perspective on the likelihood of findi
21、ng a better offer at this stage. The level of trust established by the listing agent through the entire process to this point can help overcome incipient sellers remorse or falling into unrealistic valuations of specific house features to which the seller may have become especially attached over tim
22、e. Of course, we expect agents to present information to sellers in a way that will promote their own interests (Salant 1991). The relationships between buyers and their agents are prone to analogous principle-agent issues. There is some recent empirical evidence that individuals negotiation skills
23、appear to matter for both sides of the transaction (Harding et al. 2003). And there is evidence that the overall difficulty of the negotiation process can affect prices (Sirmans et al. 1992). While these studies do not examine the role of agents, they imply that agents who can reinforce the bargaini
24、ng power of their party or generally smooth the negotiation process will likely affect selling prices. Many real estate scholars view the closing phase almost as an afterthought. Most transactions that reach the point of an accepted sales contract close without major mishap. Nonetheless, real estate
25、 agents have a role and incentive help their seller (or buyer, in the case of buyers agents) complete the transaction, whether by coordinating tasks required to fulfill the sales contract or helping to resolve sales contract performance issues. All of these types of inputs by agents lower sellers and buyers total transactions costs and thereby possibly affect prices or liquidity. In summary, we argue that agents have more channels through which to
