本科毕业设计（论文） 外 文 翻 译Individual Agents, Firms, and the Real Estate Brokerage ProcessIntroductionThis 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 neighborhood. 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 effects 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 degrees 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 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/matching 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 characteristics 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 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 listing 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 comparative 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 the data set and discusses the empirical results. The last section concludes.Agents and the Sales ProcessWe 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 invest 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 competing 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 may 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 (Johnson 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 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 the 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 bu