خرافه پرستی و آپارتمان های "خوش شانس": شواهدی از داده های در سطح معامله

Using a sample of apartment transactions during 2004–2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore, with the numbers 8 and 6 signifying good luck, and the number 4 bad luck. We find that secondhand apartments located on floors ending with “8” fetch, on average, a 235 RMB higher price (per square meter) than on other floors. For newly constructed apartments, this price premium disappears due to uniform pricing of new housing units, but apartments on floors ending in an “8” are sold, on average, 6.9 days faster than on other floors. Buyers who have a phone number containing more “8”’s are more likely to purchase apartments in a floor ending with “8”; this suggests that at least part of the price premium for “lucky” apartments arises from the buyers’ superstitious beliefs.

Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore. The numbers 6 and 8 are lucky numbers because these numbers sound like the words for, respectively, “smooth” and “fortune”, while 4 is considered an unlucky number because its pronunciation is similar to the word for “death”. There is ample anecdotal evidence regarding the importance of “lucky numbers” in Asian real estate markets, even real estate markets in non-Asian countries with a high percentage of Asian immigrants.1 Using a 10% randomized sample from overall apartment transactions from July 2004 to December 2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. A unique feature of our dataset is that we observe a rich set of buyer’s characteristics, including arguably exogenous measures of buyers’ beliefs in superstition. This allows us to corroborate “superstitious” behavior in the housing market with other types of superstitious behavior, which provides a reality check on the results. We find that secondhand apartments located on floors ending with “8” fetch, on average, a 235 renminbi yuan (RMB) higher price (per square meter) than other floors. For newly constructed apartments, we do not find a lucky number effect on prices due to uniform pricing of new housing units, but apartments on floors ending in an “8” are sold, on average, 6.9 days faster than on other floors. These results suggest that buyers find apartments located on “lucky” floors to be especially attractive. Of course, one explanation is simply that buyers in this market are superstitious; this is a direct effect of superstition. However, apartments are durable goods, and in durable goods markets, anticipation of high resale prices has important effects on current demand, so that even buyers who are not superstitious may buy a lucky apartment in order to enjoy the higher resale prices in the future; leading to an indirect effect of superstition. Exploiting our dataset, we use a unique and unusual measure – the number of “8”’s in a buyer’s phone number – as an exogenous measure of how superstitious a buyer is. We find that buyers with more “8”’s in their phone number are more likely to buy apartments on lucky floors; this suggests that at least part of the price premium for apartments on lucky floors arises from intrinsic superstitiousness on the part of buyers.

Using a unique transaction level data with buyers’ characteristics in Chengdu, we find that secondhand apartments on floors ending with the digit “8” fetch a price premium of 235 RMB (per square meter) relative to other floors. For new apartments, which are sold at uniform prices, we find that apartments on floors ending in “8” sell 6.9 days faster than those on other floors. We show that buyers whose phone number has more “8” are more likely to purchase a “lucky” floor apartment, suggesting that at least part of the price premium for 8th floor apartments arises from the buyers’ superstitious beliefs. Therefore, relative to fundamentals, superstition could be an important source of mispricing in real estate markets.