In standard principal-agent problems, the issue at hand is how to align the interests of the agent with those of her principal. A commonly used contract involves the principal paying the agent a percentage of the sale price as commission. With respect to real estate brokerage conracts, it has...

This paper seeks to fill a gap in the real estate finance literature by linking the well-known history of the Anglo-American mortgage recorded by legal scholars with the recent literature on security design and incomplete contracting in order to explain and evaluate several unique features of...