This Thursday Ziye Zhang, a post-doctoral fellow in the Cornell Institute for China Economic Research, will share his research on the role of “buy-sellers” in housing markets. The talk, Modeling Buy-Seller in Housing Markets: A Bidding Network Perspective to Understand Market Mechanisms, will be held tomorrow, August 30 at 4:30 p.m. in W. Sibley Hall, Room 115.
Zhang completed his Ph.D. in regional science at Cornell this year. In addition to his post-doc work, he also serves as a visiting lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at AAP. An abstract of the paper he will discuss is reprinted below:
This paper focuses on modeling buy-sellers in urban housing markets. Traditional economic models treat a household in a dichotomic manner as either a buyer or a seller. However, many households buy and sell at the same time. More importantly, their buying and selling decisions are interdependent to each other. The purchase depends on a successful sale due to budget or policy restrictions; the sale relies on a successful bid to avoid renting for a living. This paper calls this type of household “buy-sellers” and shows their essential role in generating a bidding network, through which one’s outcome will influence others. This paper, for the first time, develops an agent-based model with the buy-sellers. This model is employed to analyze the impact of housing purchase restriction policies — which are interpreted as a shock converting some pure buyers into buy-sellers — on market outcomes and the offset effects of home brokerage.
More information on this and other Department of City and Regional Planning (CRP) lectures can be found here.