The effect of buyers and sellers on fish market prices

International audienceThis paper extends the traditional hedonic price specification to take into account the unobserved heterogeneity of sellers, buyers and seller-buyer matches. The specification is estimated using econometric techniques for non-nested panel data models on a data set of nearly 15 million transactions occurring in French wholesale fish markets over the 2002-2007 period. Results show that unobserved heterogeneity plays a significant role in price setting. For some species, its inclusion in price regressions changes the coefficients of quality-related fish characteristics. Fish characteristics are the main factors explaining price variations for many species, but time and buyer effects also play a significant role