Home warranties are often criticized for their lack of worth to a potential home buyer. We argue that both home buyers and home sellers may benefit from warranties, though the benefits are very small. If home buyers are risk averse, home warranties provide a valuable form of insurance. Sellers...

We examine commission splits between listing and selling agents in real estate transactions. We construct a theoretical model to show that agency problems arise when a listing agent attempts to maximize his or her payoff while setting the commission split. Mitigation to these agency problems can...

This study is the first to examine the principal-agent issues surrounding how agents' efforts to sell their own properties affect their efforts to sell concurrently listed client properties. The principal-agent model shows that listed agent-owned properties induce agents to worker harder over...