Real estate brokers compete in localized markets generally characterized by low barriers to entry and many participants; however, widespread and consistent price coordination has persisted over multiple decades. Previous research has found that while anecdotal instances of high concentration exist, the industry is relatively unconcentrated. In the past decade and a half, a major recession and a pandemic have significantly reduced housing supply in many markets. We analyzed the competitiveness of the market structure of residential real estate brokerage in 200 individual U.S. markets, varying by size and geographic location, to see whether real estate brokerage markets have become more concentrated. Contrary to expectations, we found that larger firms were more adversely affected by the nationwide reduction in listings and that competitiveness of market structure in this industry was not negatively impacted. Additionally, we were able to engage in a longitudinal comparison in 90 of these markets, 14 years apart, allowing us to observe the impact of a sizable contraction in the overall volume of listings that occurred in 2021.

Real estate agents play a critical role in reducing transaction costs in home sales. The incentives they face and the effect they have on selling price and time on market have been shown to differ depending on the legal setting governing the contractual relationship between principal (home owner) and agent. Using 8 years of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data from a large Midwestern city, we study a market where the large majority of transactions involve a listing agent working directly with the seller and a cooperating agent working directly with the buyer. We find that more active agents sell homes more quickly, but at a lower price. Important differences emerge when we separate agents’ roles into listing agents and selling agents. We find that recent market activity by listing agents leads to significantly lower sales prices and a quicker sale. An additional listing in the previous 60 days is associated with a 0.3% reduction in sales price and a 0.8-day decrease in days on market. More active selling agents are associated with fewer days on market, but with no apparent impact on price. Relative to less active agents, listing agents in the most active quintile are associated with an 8% lower transaction price and 14 fewer days on market.

DRAFT: for presentation in Berger Applied Microeconomics Workshop, University of Kentucky, 11/9/12, and obviously not ready for quotation!! 1 People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. 1 I believe that my theory of oligopoly is a useful tool for this study, precisely because it seeks to isolate the determinants and forms of successful collusion—or rather, the determinants of successful cheating and hence unsuccessful collusion. The argument turns on the problem of getting reliable information on the observance of collusive agreements. 2 Introduction Understanding firms' attempts to collude drives much of economists' study of oligopoly. Detection and deterrence of collusion are perhaps the primary challenges of antitrust policy.

The game show The Weakest Link contains a version of the three-way duel, or truel, a strategic situation which historically has attracted considerable attention from economists and mathematicians. Data collected from actual episodes of the show provide an excellent opportunity to test behavioral motivations of this classic problem in a natural laboratory with substantial monetary payoffs. We use data from U.S., French, and British versions of the show and compute the Nash equilibria for each episode based on the maximization of monetary returns. We then analyze whether players play Nash strategies; whether their decisions are motivated by race, gender, or age discrimination; or whether they are motivated by reciprocity/revenge based on player interactions in previous rounds. There is only limited evidence that players play Nash equilibrium strategies or that they engage in race and age discrimination. The strongest predictor of behavior is reciprocity-players taking revenge on those voting against them in previous rounds.

Assessing the intensity of college football rivalries is an annual exercise of sports columnists. Fan polling, average ticket price, and even the bad behaviors of athletes have been used to quantify and rank rivalries. For economists, market prices of tickets have an appealing behavioral interpretation as they represent fans' marginal willingness to substitute game attendance for other sources of utility. We have collected secondary market data on 278,117 individual ticket sales at different points in the season for 171 home games played by Southeastern Conference (SEC) member football teams over a 2-year period. Our rich data set allows us to control for the quality of the seats and the effects of on-field successes or failures during the season. Since we use data from 2 successive years, we are also able to normalize the level effect on prices of certain stadiums. We construct a willingness-to-pay measure of fan interest in various matchups and use this to compare the intensity of different rivalries for SEC schools.

Over the past 13 years, we have published more than a thousand scientific research articles. Many thousands of scientists have trusted us to manage the assessment of their work and, all being well, disseminate it to the scientific community. We have been supported in this endeavor by Nature Publishing Group, who have been our publishing partners for most of the journal’s history. It has been a long and fruitful partnership, but the time for change has come. The scientific publishing landscape is shifting in many directions. New vistas are opening up and finding our way across them—as scientists and editors—requires a change in perspective and the independence to do new things. EMBO is therefore launching its own scientific publishing identity, EMBO Press, in partnership with Wiley and HighWire Press, who will help us to realize our vision of fair, transparent and data-enriched scientific publishing. EMBO Reports will be an integral part of this endeavor: we will continue to apply and improve the EMBO Press editorial policies, including transparent peer-review, scooping protection, referee cross-commenting and the source data initiative, and we will continue to provide a forum for discussing the wider impact of and issues surrounding the scientific endeavour. EMBO Press will be a shared identity for the four EMBO journals: EMBO Reports, The EMBO Journal, Molecular Systems Biology and EMBO Molecular Medicine. As such, it will serve as a platform for our policies and initiatives, guided by the scientific community at large and by our international advisory boards of leading scientific researchers. We hope that a single, strong voice that pushes for greater fairness and transparency in the interest of the scientific community will improve the way that science is communicated and used, and that scientists are assessed. We understand that the true driving force of science is not money, fame or fashion; it is curiosity. Scientists ask questions about the world and work carefully to discover answers. We would like to publish those answers in a way that is fair to authors and useful to our readers and those who will revisit these questions in the future. What does this mean for EMBO Reports? For more than a decade now, in addition to high-quality, short-format scientific reports and accessible reviews, EMBO Reports has published Science & Society articles on the broader impact and implications of scientific research. We hope that EMBO Press will become home to an active community of engaged scientists for discussing such issues, including science research, practice, policy and, of course, publishing. Ideas and conversations might evolve into ‘formally’ published content in the EMBO Press journals, whilst EMBO Reports’ thought-provoking articles and editorials will gain a new platform for dissemination and debate. The most obvious and immediate change, then, is the launch of the EMBO Reports website, alongside the new EMBO Press platform. This will not just be a cosmetic makeover: in the months to come, we will make significant enhancements to the way that we help scientists present their data, making it more accessible and reusable, improving the experience for both authors and readers. We will also continue to refine our editorial policies, based on community feedback, to ensure that the assessment and publishing experience at the EMBO Press family of journals is among the fairest and most transparent. Together, these improvements will allow EMBO Reports to continue its mission of publishing groundbreaking, relevant observations that are both exciting and reliable. EMBO Press stands for a better way of tackling the publication of science, backed up by some thoughtful editorial policies and innovative ideas for technologies. As such, EMBO Press is a compass pointing in the direction we think we should take across the changing publishing landscape. We hope that our authors and readers will agree with us on the direction and lead us onward. It is an ambitious goal, but EMBO has always been about setting high standards and good examples. EMBO Press is the next step on the journey, and the editors of EMBO Reports are excited to be along for the ride.

Tickets to sporting events are highly differentiated seat location, date and time of the game, and home-team and opponent qualities make each ticket unique. Preferences also differ nontrivially across fans, all of which make the supplier's pricing problem complex. We examine strategies employed by Southeastern Conference (SEC) universities in pricing their football tickets and evaluate their effectiveness in extracting surplus from fans. We use hedonic analysis of data collected from online secondary market transactions to construct a synthetic season ticket, which we compare to prices actually charged by university athletic departments. We also compare quality premiums charged by universities for better seats with market evaluations of those quality differences.

We examine the market structure for real estate brokerage services across six large metropolitan areas, to see whether low-income neighborhoods or neighborhoods where house prices are low are as well served by real estate professionals as higher income or higher price neighborhoods. We collect more than 300,000 real estate listings and compute the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for each zip code neighborhood in each MSA. When we divide neighborhoods based on income, house value, and race, we find no evidence that access is worse in disadvantaged areas; that is, the market structure for brokerage services is at least as competitive in less advantaged neighborhoods. We also analyze market leaders in the six cities and find that some firms specialize in particular market segments, however.

The competitiveness of the residential real estate brokerage industry has attracted much attention. Anecdotal evidence suggests some local markets are concentrated, yet no systematic market structure study has been conducted. We collected cross‐sectional data on real estate brokers in 90 diverse markets across the United States and collected longitudinal data for Louisville, Kentucky. In medium and large markets, no evidence exists that market concentration might create problems for competition. Small markets, on average, have higher Herfindahl‐Hirschman Indexes than medium and large markets. The longitudinal data reveal that many small brokers sell a house or two one year and none the next year.

Tickets to sporting events are highly differentiated - seat location, when the game is played, and home team and opponent qualities make each ticket unique. Preferences also differ nontrivially across fans, all of which make the supplier's pricing problem complex. We examine strategies employed by Southeastern Conference universities in pricing their football tickets, and evaluate their effectiveness in extracting surplus from fans. We use hedonic analysis of data collected from online secondary market transactions to construct a synthetic season ticket, which we compare to prices actually charged by university athletic departments. We also compare quality premiums charged by universities for better seats with market evaluations of those quality differences.

The persistence of the standard six percent real estate sales commission across markets and over time calls into question the competitiveness of the residential real estate brokerage industry. While there is anecdotal evidence that some local real estate markets are fairly concentrated, no systematic study of market structures has been conducted. We have collected primary data on the number and market shares of real estate brokers in a variety of small, medium, and large real estate markets across the U.S. for 2007 and 2009. In addition to these cross sectional data, we have also collected longitudinal data on the size distribution of firms for Louisville, KY for a nine-year period. In our cross-sectional analysis of medium and large markets, we find no evidence that market concentration might create problems for competition. We do find that small markets on average have higher HHI’s than medium and large markets. The longitudinal analysis reveals that many small brokers are in and out of the market, selling a house or two one year and selling zero houses the next year.

Some goods are consumed not just for their intrinsic utility but also for the impression their consumption has on others. We analyze the market for such a commodity—diamonds. We collect data on price and other attributes from the inventories of three large online retailers of diamonds. We find that people are willing to pay premiums upward of 18% for a diamond that is one‐half carat rather than slightly less than a half carat and between 5% and 10% for a one‐carat rather than a slightly less than one‐carat stone. Since a major portion of larger gem‐quality diamonds are used for engagement rings, such an outcome is consistent with Bernheim's model of conformism, where individuals try to conform to a single standard of behavior that is often established at a focal point. In this case, prospective grooms signal their desirability as a mate by the size of the diamond engagement ring they give their fiancées. (JEL A1, D4)

We use the April 1993 Current Population Survey to examine the health insurance coverage decisions of the unemployed and to simulate the potential effects of the new Kassebaum-Kennedy legislation. After controlling for demographic characteristics, COBRA eligibility raises the probability of health insurance coverage by 0.095, while eligibility for spouse employer insurance increases the likelihood of coverage by 0.31 8, and eligibility for both increases the likelihood of coverage by 0.341. In our simulations, we find that had Kassebaum-Kennedy been in effect in April 1993, 9.0 percent of the unemployed would be eligible to take up coverage, and the coverage rate of the unemployed would have been increased by 0.85 percent to 1.5 percent from 41.6 percent. Our estimates of the effect of Kassebaum-Kennedy on health insurance coverage are much lower than those reported by the Government Accounting Office prior to the passage of the legislation. O 1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

ABSTRACT Existing analyses of electricity deregulation have focused on situations where horizontal market power is present. This paper instead evaluates a market where a competitive outcome is more likely. Competitive market supply and demand curves for electricity have been simulated for a twenty‐state region. These simulated supply and demand curves are used to predict short‐run and long‐run prices for electric power. Many consumers will see a drop in the portion of their electric bills accounted for by the current economic costs of supplying them with electricity. Adjustments to consumers’ bills for stranded cost recovery will be determined by legislators and regulators on a state‐by‐state and utility‐by‐utility basis. Because of excess capacity that currently exists in the industry, the decline in prices will be greater in the short run than in the long run.

We estimate discrete time hazard models of employment duration and standard logarithmic wage equations using the 1987 and 1990 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the phenomenon of job lock. We test for job lock using differences-in-differences approaches among those with and without employer-provided health insurance and family members with and without health problems. We find no statistically significant evidence of job lock on employment duration or wages using this approach. We do find some evidence of shorter employment spells for those with employer-provided health insurance and spouse-provided health insurance, and longer employment spells for those with employer-provided health insurance and large families. Others have interpreted these findings as evidence of job lock. However, the wage equation results using these measures are not consistent with job lock. Although anecdotal evidence makes it clear that some workers have been locked into less-than-optimal jobs because of the combination of health problems and employer-provided health insurance, our results do not suggest that this phenomenon is pervasive in the U.S. economy.

In the spirit of Polachek (1975) and the later work of Becker (1985) on the role of specialization within the family, we examine the relationship between fringe benefits and the division of labor within a married household. The provision of fringe benefits is complicated by their non-additive nature within the household, as well as IRS regulations that stipulate that they be offered in a non-discriminatory manner in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. We model family decisions within a framework in which one spouse specializes in childcare and as a result experiences a reduction in market productive capacity. Our model predicts that the forces toward specialization become stronger as the number of children increase, so that the spouse specializing in childcare will have some combination of lower wages, hours worked, and fringe benefits. We demonstrate that to the extent that labor markets are incomplete, the family is less likely to obtain health insurance from the employer of the spouse that specializes in childcare. Using data from the April 1993 CPS we find evidence consistent with our model.