Identification and Estimation of Hedonic Models

This paper considers the identification and estimation of hedonic models. We establish that in an additive version of the hedonic model, technology and preferences are generically nonparametrically identified from data on demand and supply in a single hedonic market. The empirical literature that claims that hedonic models estimated on data from a single market are fundamentally underidentified is based on arbitrary linearizations that do not use all the information in the model. The exact economic model that justifies linear approximations is unappealing. Nonlinearities are generic features of equilibrium in hedonic models and a fundamental and economically motivated source of identification.