Research On The Invisible Transaction Cost In New Housing Market

The serious problem of incomplete information in China's new housing marketleads to high invisible transaction cost to homebuyers, which weakens families'housing consumption. However, there is still no systematic research on invisibletransaction cost in domestic academia. In this dissertation, the invisible transactioncost of new housing marker in Beijing was taken as the research object. Themechanism of invisible transaction cost was theoretically analyzed, and theblocking effects of searching cost and neighborhood attachment cost on housingconsumption were empirically studied.In terms of theoretical analysis, the dissertation established a framework foranalyzing the invisible transaction cost in new housing market. The concept,classification and characteristics of invisible transaction cost were illustrated. Themechanism and blocking effort of searching cost and neighborhood attachment coston housing consumption were discussed in details.Based on the theoretical research, empirical studies were conducted in thefollowing fields:(1)Housing information and searching behavior. The channels andfeatures of useful housing information were investigated. The decision of homebuyersto use the Internet as a search tool and its impact on the efficiency of buyers' searchprocess was especially discussed. The impacts of Internet information on the housingsearch efficiency among different families were analyzed using structural equationmodeling (SEM).(2)Searching cost in the new housing market of Beijing. A specialHedonic model was built to estimate the parameter represented for searching cost.Maximum Likelihood Estimation method was used to estimate the characteristicparameter of searching cost by Matlab programming. Then the ratio of searching cost tohousing price in Beijing's new housing market was calculated.(3)Neighborhoodattachment cost for the homebuyers in Beijing. Multivariate Logit and Probit livingsatisfaction models were constructed to analyze the different neighborhood attachmenteffects and costs between homeowners and renters. The diversity of neighborhoodattachment costs among different income families was evaluated.The empirical results indicated that:(1)Among different housing informationchannels, the Internet was used most frequently, which was up to62.48%. Families living in the rent buildings were more apt to use the Internet in the housing searchprocess than homeowners. The formers were slightly more effective in using theInternet to increase the search intensity, lower the search duration and reduce the timespent on viewing each house. Although the Internet does have positive impact in thehousing search process, the influence is not significant in China nowadays.(2)Searchingcost for homebuyers in new housing market of Beijing took up5.59%of housing pricein general sense. Housing search can only make up for57.33%of informationdisadvantaged loss for homebuyers. It means that homebuyers can not change theinformation shortcoming efficaciously even through large scale of housing search.(3)Compared with high income homeowners, the low income homeowners had lowerneighborhood attachment utility. The neighborhood attachment cost for the familyliving in the rent buildings was insignificant.The more income increased for the familiesliving in the rent buildings, the more intensively they wanted to move away from theoriginal living place.Finally, the efficiencies of three commission methods (percentage commissionfee, fixed amount commission fee and retained commission fee) of sellerbrokerage service were discussed. The seller brokerage service with fixedamount commission fee was showed to be the best commission method of sellerbrokerage to reduce the invisible transaction cost for homebuyers.