Konishi, Hideo. “Entrepreneurial Land Developers”. Boston College Working Papers in Economics 777, 2011.
Abstract
Housing developments (condos and suburban developments) are not necessarily homogeneous. Developers provide different types of units with various sizes and other characteristics catering to different types of customers. In this paper, we allow local consumption externalities within each development: some consumers would be happy to pay high prices for the most prestigious units in the development, while some are happy to have modest units as long as the prices are low. We consider land developers who seek the optimal mix of units in developments to maximize their profits. We show that there exists an equilibrium, and that every equilibrium is Pareto efficient as long as consumers and developers are optimistic in a certain sense. We provide examples in which mixed developments are more profitable to the developers. We relate this work to widely used hedonic pricing model by Rosen (1974), and to an equilibrium concept under asymmetric information by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976).
