EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Agency and Brokerage of Real Assets in Competitive Equilibrium

Joseph T Williams

The Review of Financial Studies, 1998, vol. 11, issue 2, 239-80

Abstract: Brokerage contracts for many categories of real assets are characterized by a common, constant commission rate payable upon sale, exclusive agency, and contractual asking prices. For a large market in steady state, these conventional contracts produce in equilibrium no agency problem between a broker and his clients. Each broker spends the same time or effort selling each client's asset as the broker would spend on his own assets. As in standard agency problems, extra effort by a broker generates first-order stochastically dominant distributions of bids by potential buyers. Unlike standard agency problems, each broker can allocate his time or effort between selling the assets of his multiple clients and searching for new clients in competition with other brokers. Because brokers' time spent searching for new sellers is dissipative, entry by brokers is excessive in equilibrium. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:oup:rfinst:v:11:y:1998:i:2:p:239-80

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:11:y:1998:i:2:p:239-80