Price Dispersion in the Housing Market: The Role of Bargaining and Search Costs

This paper develops a matching model à la Pissarides (2000) in order to explain a basic fact of housing markets: price dispersion. The variance in house prices is basically due to both the ex-ante heterogeneity of the parties (i.e., bargaining power, tastes, asymmetric information) and the search costs of buyers and sellers. In fact, sellers and buyers spend time and money before concluding the deal. Furthermore, the house price is substantially determined by bargaining between the parties. These factors affect the selling price and lead to price dispersion. This simple theoretical model is able to take these distinctive features of the housing markets into account