Properties that Sell at or above Listing Price: Strategic Pricing,Better Broker or Just Dumb Luck?

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - A surprisingly large number of houses sell above listing prices in a wide range of markets and in all market conditions. The question is: why do...     

Jack of All Trades or a Master of One? Specialization,Trade, and Money*

We consider a model of decentralized exchange where individuals choose the set of goods they produce. Specialization involves producing a smaller set of goods and doing it more proficiently. In doing so, agents reduce production costs, but also reduce the ease of trading their output. We derive the equilibrium degree of specialization and examine how it is affected by underlying fundamentals. Due to the existence of a hold‐up problem, individuals specialize too little relative to the social optimum. Introducing money leads to more specialization relative to barter and increases welfare.     

Top‐Down Versus Bottom‐Up Demand Forecasts: The Value of Shared Point‐of‐Sale Data in the Retail Supply Chain

Accurate demand forecasts are critical to maintaining customer service levels and minimizing total costs, yet increasingly difficult to achieve. Using weekly point‐of‐sale (POS) and order data for 10 ready‐to‐eat cereal stock‐keeping units from 18 regional U.S. grocery distribution centers, this research empirically investigates two demand forecasting issues: (1) the accuracy of top‐down versus bottom‐up demand forecasts; and (2) whether shared POS data improve demand forecast accuracy. The results reveal a previously unexplored relationship between demand forecast methodology and the use of shared POS data. We find that the superiority of the top‐down or bottom‐up forecasting as the more accurate demand forecast method depends on whether shared POS data are used.     

Evolutionary Economics and Cultural Hermeneutics: Veblen,Cultural Relativism,and Blind Drift

The aim of this paper is to quantify the importance of institutions in economic growth and to identify the factors that determine institutional quality. For this purpose, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations with an income equation and another one of institutional quality and use a broad sample of countries with very different levels of development. The analysis is also carried out for three sub-samples of different income levels. In addition, a test of the robustness of the results to econometric techniques is performed.