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Estimating House Price Indexes in the Presence of Seller Reservation Prices

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2006 88(1), 100-112
We analyze a bias in transaction-based price indexes due to the presence of seller reservation prices. We develop a model in which the ratio of sellers' reservation prices to the market value affects trading volume and biases of observed transaction prices: when trading volume decreases (increases), index returns are estimated with an upward (downward) bias. We propose a new econometric procedure to mitigate the bias, and use simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness of the procedure. We construct a reserve-conditional unbiased index for the Los Angeles housing market, which substantially differs from a traditional repeat sale index.