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s in a way that will promote their own interests (Salant 1991). The relationships between buyers and their agents are prone to analogous principleagent issues. There is some recent empirical evidence that individuals’ negotiation skills appear to matter for both sides of the transaction (Harding et al. 2021). And there is evidence that the overall difficulty of the negotiation process can affect prices (Sirmans et al. 1992). While these studies do not examine the role of agents, they imply that agents who can reinforce the bargaining power of their party or generally smooth the negotiation process will likely affect selling prices. Many real estate scholars view the closing phase almost as an afterthought. Most transactions that reach the point of an accepted sales contract close without major mishap. Noheless, real estate agents have a role and incentive help their seller (or buyer, in the case of buyer’s agents) plete the transaction, whether by coordinating tasks required to fulfill the sales contract or helping to resolve sales contract performance issues. All of these types of inputs by agents lower sellers’ and buyers’ total transactions costs and thereby possibly affect prices or liquidity. In summary, we argue that agents have more channels through which to influence transaction outes than just through their skill in matching willing sellers with willing buyers. Individual agents can vary how they split time among a range of activities and that some may have parative advantages and therefore specialize more heavily in certain aspects of the transaction process. This observation motivates our effort to measure how market outes are affected by individual agents’ decisions to specialize in listing or sellingoriented activities or concentrate their investment in market information to focus on specific neighborhoods or market segments. Turning to the roles of firms versus individual agents, the real estate agency relationship is an interlacing set of principalagent relationships: between the seller and agent, of course, but also between the brokerage firm and its associated agents as well as between buyers and their agents. This suggests that we need to include variables in the empirical model to capture both firm level and individual agent level effects on observed transactions. We do so in this study, estimating a series of models with firm effects and with both firm and individual agent effects. Despite the importance of the topic, published real estate research does not offer much solid evidence about how individual real estate agents affect property markets. Much work has been done on real estate brokerage in general, both theoretical and empirical. The theoretical models, however, often assume no distinction between a firm and its individual agents. Indeed, the terms ―firm‖ and ―agent‖ are sometimes used interchangeably (Turnbull 1996。 Yang and Yavas 1995). And while there is a growing empirical literature concerning individual real estate agents, the bulk of it focuses on agents’ earnings rather than their role in the market (Benjamin et al. 2021。 Benjamin et al. 2021。 Yavas 1994). The empirical