Search frictions in rental markets: Evidence from urban China

Ying Fan, Yuqi Fu, Zan Yang and Ming Chen

China Economic Review, 2024, vol. 83, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we study consumer search in a housing market subject to objective frictions induced by intermediaries and psychological frictions intrinsic to tenants themselves. Using rental data from a leading real estate brokerage company during 2016 and 2018, we find a unimodal distribution of objective search frictions and a bimodal distribution of psychological search frictions revealed by tenants' search behaviors. This bimodal distribution originates from divergent search strategies of tenants with different search criteria. Furthermore, psychological search frictions explain the deviation between a tenant's actual choice and stated preference, and enhance the degree of overpay/mark-up in the deal. These effects of psychological frictions led by divergent search strategies hold when we consider the expertise/incentive of agents and the rigidity/opportunity cost of tenants' search. Aggregately, psychological search frictions result in a dispersed and asymmetric distribution of rent residuals.

Keywords: Search strategy; Friction; Rental market; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 D91 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X23001852
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:83:y:2024:i:c:s1043951x23001852

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2023.102100

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().