Nonparametric estimation of a hedonic price function

Rosen's ( 1974 ) theory of hedonic prices is implemented econometrically using recently developed nonparametric techniques to examine the influence of qualitative factors on the price of a house. Our ability to smooth categorical variables leads to greater generalization in the valuation process and provides a canvas for interactions between categorical and continuous variables that is difficult to exploit in parametric and semiparametric models. This is illustrated with a replication of a previously used partially linear model specification. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hedonic Price Models for Dynamic Markets*

The price of a product depends on its characteristics and will vary in dynamic markets. The model describes a processing firm that bids in an auction for a heterogeneous and perishable input. The reduced form of this model is estimated as an expanded random parameter model that combines a nonlinear hedonic bid function and inverse input demand functions for characteristics. The model was estimated by using 289,405 transactions from the Icelandic fish auctions. Total catch and gut ratio were the main determinants of marginal prices of characteristics, while the price of cod mainly depended on size, gutting and storage.     

Estimating the Demand for Housing, Land, and Neighbourhood Characteristics

This paper provides estimates of the structure of demand for individual housing and neighbourhood characteristics and for land in two British cities. We estimate a hedonic price function, and from this obtain the implicit prices of house attributes. These prices are used to estimate a demand system for each city. These perform well, and enable us to calculate price and income elasticities for each of the non-dichotomous characteristics and for land. To counteract criticisms of demand estimates derived within the hedonic framework a method is developed for selecting an appropriate set of instrumental variables. Estimates derived from this method, however, differ only slightly from those obtained using the conventional techniques. Several features of these estimates provide insights into the unusual characteristics of the British housing market, the effects of constraints imposed by land use planning, and the effects of changing income distribution on the structure of demand.     

Risk and prices in separable utility functions

Many decision problems involve more than one attribute. Separable multi-attribute utility functions are commonly used to model preferences in such situations. We consider the case in which one attribute can be identified as money. The price at which non-monetary attributes may be substituted by money, the relation of this price to a decision-maker's wealth, and the implications on attitudes toward risk are examined for additively and multiplicatively separable multi-attribute utility functions. In particular, it is shown that additive separability, price independent of wealth and monetary risk-aversion are mutually inconsistent.     

Implicit markets and the demand for housing characteristics

Important methodological problems in applying Rosen's (1974) model of implicit markets to housing characteristics are inadequately addressed in the literature. This paper summarizes these methodological issues and discusses advantages and disadvantages of various means of coping with these problems in empirical applications. Structural housing characteristics demand estimates are presented, along with an assessment of their accuracy. The results generally are insensitive to specification choices, suggesting the findings are plausible.     

Past price ‘memory’ in the housing market: testing the performance of different spatio-temporal specifications

Recent methodological developments provide a way to incorporate the temporal dimension when accounting for spatial effects in hedonic pricing. Weight matrices should decompose the spatial effects into two distinct components: bidirectional contemporaneous spatial connections; and unidirectional spatio-temporal effects from past transactions. Our iterative estimation approach explicitly analyses the role of time in price determination. The results show that both spatio-temporal components should be included in model specification; past transaction information stops contributing to price determination after eight months; and limited temporal friction is exhibited within this period. These findings highlight the decidedly non-linear temporal patterns of such information effects.     

Estimating consumer preferences using market data—an application to us automobile demand

This paper explores the possibility of using market data to identify consumer preferences. A utility function composed of ‘homogeneous’ characteristics and goods-specific effects is used as a basic link between the goods space and the characteristics space. The functional form for the hedonic price equation, the data requirements and issues of measurement errors for estimating demand and supply of characteristics are discussed. We illustrate the methodology by considering the US automobile demand using 1969–86 data compiled from Consumer Reports and Ward's Automotive Yearbook.     

A dymimic model of housing price determination

This paper presents and estimates a model of the resale housing market. The data are a cross-section of monthly time series obtained from the multiple-listing service for a suburb of San Diego. The model is specified and estimated as a dynamic multiple indicator multiple cause system of equations where the capitalization rate is taken to be an unobservable time series to be estimated jointly with the unknown parameters. These are estimated by maximum likelihood using an EM algorithm based upon Kalman filtering and smoothing.The specification of the model features hedonic equations for each house sale and a dynamic equation for the capitalization rate which is constrained to make the expectation of prices equal the present value of the net returns to home ownership whenever the economic variables stabilize at steady state values. Out of steady state, the capitalization rate slowly adapts to new information.The model attributes a large portion of housing price increases of the 1970's to a fall in the capitalization rate which in turn was driven by rental inflation, tax rates and mortgage rates. Post-sample simulations indicate an initial flattening of housing inflation rates and later a fall brought on by the increase in steady state capitalization rates. In-sample simulations show that although both Proposition 13 and the inflation induced rise in the marginal income tax rates provided partial explanations for the fall in capitalization rates, the single most important factor was the acceleration in price of housing services which interacted with the tax treatment of home ownership to produce an amazing 18% average annual rate of price increase over the last seven years of the 1970's.     

基于hedonic模型的房地产价格质量变动效应分析

对hedonic模型的发明历史进行了回顾;对hedonic模型应用于房地产价格分析时的质量特征设定及价格数据收集工作进行了分析。提出质量变动效应的概念,推导出基于hedonic模型的质量变动效应的计量公式,并得出结论:分析房价中的质量变动效应是重要的;城市基础设施的建设对房地产价格会产生明显的质量变动效应;政府部门的房地产交易数据应向社会公开,以利人们的研究使用;政府要利用质量变动效应,合理控制经济适用房的品质。     

An alternative test of the hedonic theory of housing markets

In this paper the hedonic theory of housing markets is used to generate a multinomial logit model of household behavior in an urban housing market. Application of hedonic theory to housing markets is by now fairly familiar and a link to multinomial logit has also been established. However, by emphasizing more heavily the bid price interpretation of hedonic theory, this paper develops a new connection to econometric estimation that essentially involves running the usual logit equations in reverse. One advantage of this approach is that the link between the logit equations and hedonic theory involves bid price rather than utility functions, and this in turn permits the empirical results to be given an extremely clear interpretation. Furthermore, in contrast to the standard logit model, the extreme value distribution required to justify the estimation technique emerges endogenously as part of the analysis.     

Product-Line Length as a Competitive Tool

The increasing number of consumer goods and services offered in recent years suggests that product-line extensions have become a favored strategy of product managers. A larger assortment, it is often argued, keeps customers loyal and allows firms to charge higher prices. There is disagreement, however, about the extent to which a longer product line translates into higher profits. We develop an econometric model derived from a game-theoretic perspective that explicitly considers firms' use of product-line length as a competitive tool. On the demand side, we analytically establish the link between consumer choice and the length of the product line. Based on our derivations, we include a measure of line length in the utility function to investigate consumer preference for variety using a brand-level discrete-choice model. The supply side is characterized by price and line length competition between oligopolistic firms. For the empirical analysis we use market-level data for the yogurt category. We find that there are decreasing returns to product-line length. Based on a series of "what-if" experiments, we derive recommendations for effective product line decisions in a competitive environment.     

Hedonic analysis of a housing market in disequilibrium

This paper tests the hypothesis that information about housing market activity and about specific dwellings becomes capitalized into single family dwelling prices through a disequilibrium adjustment process. A dynamic price adjustment model, which is an extension of the standard hedonic model widely used in the literature, is derived, specified, and tested with both micro and aggregated data from the city of Chicago and for the period 1972–1976. The results show that from 32 to 75% of the variance in dwelling prices, unexplained by the standard hedonic attributes under assumptions of equilibrium, is explained by market activity signals such as mortgage interest rates and neighborhood transaction rates of the preceding period. Dwellings about which there is less information, making comparison pricing difficult, are shown to command a price premium. The standard equilibrium hypothesis appears readily rejectable and better predictions are obtained from the disequilibrium specifications. Several directions for extending this line of research are discussed.     

Consumer demand theory,goods and characteristics: Breathing empirical content into the Lancastrian approach

To begin with, it is argued that consumer demand theory has resulted in narrowly econometric more than broadly managerial applications. Further, Lancaster's recognition of the intrinsic attributes of goods has not been adequately exploited. Lancaster is summarized and appraised and empirical work to date reviewed. Finally a test of the characteristics hypothesis is given, using survey data on beer consumption. Subjectivity of choice is explicitly recognized and factor analysis is used to evaluate the components of demand of which quality and price variables appear to dominate. With the matching of the people-characteristics features (demand) and the technical goods-characteristics attributes (supply) a method of predicting demand is derived. This methodology may be used for a wide range of consumer goods.     

Intertemporal substitution in import demand and habit formation

To study non-durable import demand, we extend previous work done by Clarida (1994) and Ceglowski (1991) by considering a two-good version of the lifecycle model in which we introduce time-non-separability in the households' preferences. The model is estimated using quarterly data for the USA and France. Using the information contained in the observed stochastic and deterministic trends, we derive a cointegration restriction used to estimate curvature parameters of the instantaneous utility function. The remaining parameters are estimated in a second step by GMM. The constancy of the different parameters is investigated, in both the long and the short run. Habit formation turns out to be an important factor of import demand. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Love thy neighbor: Income distribution and housing preferences

Do homeowners prefer living in an area with a more equal distribution of income? We answer this question by estimating a semi-parametric hedonic pricing model for about 90,000 housing units transacted in Hong Kong between 2005 and 2006. We first identify a hedonic price function by locally regressing the rental price of the housing unit on its intrinsic and neighborhood characteristics, one of which is the Gini coefficient for household income of the constituency area. We then combine the estimates with a log utility function to obtain the heterogeneous preference parameters. Finally, we estimate the joint distribution of the preference parameters and demographics. We find that most homeowners have a strong distaste for inequality in their neighborhood, and the distaste increases with income and goes down with education level. Counterfactual experiments show that reallocating public rental housing by half can increase the welfare of homeowners by about HK$8,000 on average per year, an amount which is equivalent to increasing the housing unit by 20 square feet or reducing the age of the unit by 5 years.     

Hedonic prices,demands for urban housing amenities,and benefit estimates

This paper uses a Rosen, two-step, hedonic price-trait demand approach to estimate demand functions for a vector of urban amenities. To ascertain whether this theoretically preferred approach yields benefit estimates which differ from the oft-used Ridker-Henning, one-step, hedonic approach we conduct a sensitivity analysis. We find that the two-step approach does yield different benefit estimates and that the differences are large for some amenities. The estimates are sensitive to the functional form of the hedonic equation when the forms are significantly different according to modified Box-Cox results, but are not particularly sensitive to specification of the amenity demand equation.     

The demand for housing in developing countries: The case of Korea

This paper presents the results of an analysis of urban housing demand for Korea taking into account the most recent findings of housing demand analysis concerning specification and aggregation biases. In order to obtain correctly specified demand functions, a procedure based on a model of the housing market originally proposed by Muth is used. Drawing on the detailed land information available in Korea, this procedure permits the calculation of an individual price per unit of housing services for each household. The results show conclusively that both the income and price elasticity of the demand for housing services in Korea are comparable to those found in the United States: the income elasticity is smaller than one and the price elasticity is negative and smaller than one in absolute value. Given the number of countries found within the per capita income range between Korea ($700) and the United States ($7800), the finding that these two countries have comparable demand elasticities is of major significance: in the absence of good national estimates, the order of magnitudes found here would be used for other country analyses.     

(Under)Mining local residential property values: A semiparametric spatial quantile autoregression

Rock mining operations, including limestone and gravel production, have considerable adverse effects on residential quality of life due to elevated noise and dust levels resulting from dynamite blasting and increased truck traffic. This paper provides the first estimates of the effects of rock mining—an environmental disamenity—on local residential property values. We focus on the relationship between a house's price and its distance from a nearby rock mine. Our analysis studies Delaware County, Ohio, which, given its unique features, provides a natural environment for the valuation of property‐value‐suppressing effects of rock mines on nearby houses. We improve upon the conventional approach to evaluating adverse effects of environmental disamenities based on hedonic house price functions. Specifically, in the pursuit of robust estimates, we develop a novel (semiparametric) partially linear spatial quantile autoregressive model which accommodates unspecified nonlinearities, distributional heterogeneity, as well as spatial dependence in the data. We derive the consistency and normality limit results for our estimator as well as propose a consistent model specification test. We find statistically and economically significant property‐value‐suppressing effects of being located near an operational rock mine which gradually decline to insignificant near‐zero values at roughly a 10‐mile distance. Our estimates suggest that, all else equal, a house located a mile closer to a rock mine is priced, on average, at about 2.3–5.1% discount, with more expensive properties being subject to larger markdowns.     

COEFFICIENT CHANGE,PRICE EFFECTS,AND IMPLICIT ELASTICITIES: ESTIMATING MICROECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OVER TWO TIME PERIODS

This paper presents and estimates an input–output model in which input coefficient changes are functions of changing prices. The model produces results that mirror the characteristics of input demand functions based on the model of cost minimization subject to producing a desired level of output. It does not rely on the specification of a functional form for input coefficients, and it does not require the use of assumptions regarding the elasticity of substitution. Instead, it allows the actual price and coefficient changes that occur between periods to identify the implicit elasticities and own- and cross-price derivatives. Using this model, it is shown how accurate measures of price effects, including the full array of own and cross-elasticities of demand, can be estimated for models comprising up to 15 sectors given data for only two time periods.     

Hedonic estimation of housing demand elasticity with a markup over marginal costs

We show that recent developments in hedonic pricing theory allow modeling of the equilibrium pricing function as the marginal cost of an additional housing unit plus a markup that varies inversely with the elasticity of demand. Useful information about demand elasticity at a given point on the envelope function can be recovered from the hedonic regression and limited information on marginal costs. In particular, the elasticity of the envelope with respect to any characteristic such as interior area provides information on the elasticity of demand. Relative price elasticities (i.e., elasticities that vary from a base value in a known way with interior area, unit type or neighborhood characteristics) can be computed from the elasticity of the hedonic envelope. Like Yinger (2010), our method is based on a single hedonic equation.We test our method using sales of new high rise condominiums in two districts within Shenzhen, China: Futian and Longgang. The results strongly confirm the main hypothesis of this paper: price elasticity with respect to size is increasing for more complex types of units. Together with estimates of marginal costs of production, these results imply that relative demand elasticity is declining for larger, more complex units.