In this paper, we study consumer search in a housing market subject to objective frictions induced by intermediaries and psychological frictions intrinsic to in tenants themselves. Using rental data from a leading real estate brokerage company during 2016 and 2018, we find a unimodal...

In this paper, we consider a housing market subject to objective and psychological search frictions. Using rental data from a leading real estate brokerage company during 2016 and 2018, we find a normal distribution of objective frictions and a bimodal distribution of subjective frictions, which...

This paper investigates how intermediaries with information advantages divert consumer search in rental markets and lead to inefficient outcomes. Using unique data on tenants’ initial preferences and property-visit records, we find that intermediaries deliberately prioritize the exhibition of...