Residential Real Estate Prices: A Room with a View

This article is the winner of the Real Estate Broker / Agency manuscript prize (sponsored by the Center for the Study of Real Estate Brokerage/ Agency at Cleveland State University) presented at the 2001 American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting. This study examines the effect that a view of Lake Erie has on the value of a home. Unlike previous studies, the current investigation is able to successfully control for view. That is, because of the unique building codes of lakefront homes in this sample, homes analyzed either do or do not have a view. Moreover, transaction-based home prices are used which is an improvement over previous studies that rely on appraisal-based data. The results indicate that square footage and lot size also significantly affect a home’s value. More importantly, having this very desirable view adds $256,544.72 (an 89.9% premium) to the value of the home.

Regret Aversion and False Reference Points in Residential Real Estate

This study empirically exams the combination of regret aversion and false reference points in a residential real estate context. Survey respondents were put in a hypothetical situation, where they had purchased an investment property several years ago. Hindsight knowledge about a foregone all time high was introduced. As hypothesized, respondents on average expressed higher regret if they had actively failed to sell at the all time high (commission scenario) than if they had simply been unaware of the potential gain (omission scenario). Women were found to be more susceptible to regret aversion and false reference points than men.

On the Fredholm property of bisingular pseudodifferential operators

For operators belonging either to a class of global bisingular pseudodifferential operators on $R^m \times R^n$ or to a class of bisingular pseudodifferential operators on a product $M \times N$ of two closed smooth manifolds, we show the equivalence of their ellipticity (defined by the invertibility of certain associated homogeneous principal symbols) and their Fredholm mapping property in associated scales of Sobolev spaces. We also prove the spectral invariance of these operator classes and then extend these results to the even larger classes of Toeplitz type operators.Comment: 21 pages. Expanded sections 3 and 4. Corrected typos. Added reference

Assessment of Real Estate Brokerage Service Quality with a Practicing Professional's Instrument

This study explores factors that affect service quality for a large residential real estate brokerage in a diverse midwestern city. It examines the extent to which overall service quality influences homebuyers to recommend the brokerage firm and to use the firm for future transactions. A Linear Structural Relations model is fit to data using the firm's service quality instrument. Results indicate statistically significant relationships between both agent characteristics and the tangible aspects of the firm, and three measures of overall service quality. Implications for the real estate industry are discussed and suggestions for improvement and future research are provided.

Shedding light on a living lab: the CLEF NEWSREEL open recommendation platform

In the CLEF NEWSREEL lab, participants are invited to evaluate news recommendation techniques in real-time by providing news recommendations to actual users that visit commercial news portals to satisfy their information needs. A central role within this lab is the communication between participants and the users. This is enabled by The Open Recommendation Platform (ORP), a web-based platform which distributes users' impressions of news articles to the participants and returns their recommendations to the readers. In this demo, we illustrate the platform and show how requests are handled to provide relevant news articles in real-time

Le Comité des Régions et la supranationalité en Europe

On peut trouver les origines de l'idée de représentation des régions au sein des institutions européennes dans la pensée politique « corporatiste » de la démocratie chrétienne ainsi que dans les courants régionalistes des années cinquante. Ce dont il faut rendre compte, ce n'est pas de la mise en oeuvre de cette conception mais du caractère tardif de sa concrétisation. C'est la crise économique des pays capitalistes au cours des années soixante-dix qui entraîna la nécessaire réforme de l'État et la relance de la construction européenne, en particulier la refonte de la politique régionale communautaire. Ces transformations ont constitué un facteur de mobilisation des régions et d'émergence du projet d’« Europe des régions » initié par les Länder allemands ; elles ont abouti à la création du Comité des régions par le traité de Maastricht. Si, du point de vue constitutionnel, le Comité est très faible, du point de vue politique, en tant que facteur de mobilisation des régions et instance de communication, il est toutefois doté d'un fort potentiel et pourrait connaître une évolution qui l'apparente à celle du Parlement européen. Le Comité ne s'est pas vraiment encore imposé sur le plan international ; il fait plutôt figure de laboratoire d'idées, au sein duquel les régions et les villes peuvent faire l'apprentissage de l'action au niveau international.The notion of representing regions in the construction of the European Union has Us origins in « corporatist » ideas of early Christian Democracy as well as in the regionalist movements of the 1950s. What is puzzling is the late application of this notion to the institutions of the Community. It was the economic crisis in capitalist countries in the 1970s, which led both to radical state reforms and to the relaunch of the Community. There were also significant reforms of European Regional Policy in this period. These transformations spawned regional mobilisations and the « Europe of the Regions » project by the German Länder. They provided the background to the setting up of the Committee of the Regions by the Treaty of Maastricht. From a constitutional-legal perspective, the Committee is very weak. From a political perspective, however, as a mobiliser of regions on the international level and as a nexus of communication among subnational levels of government, it has the potential to evolve in a manner similar to the European Parliament. Up to the present, it has not adopted a high profile on the international stage but has rather been a laboratory within which regions and local authorities may learn to do so

Les partis politiques et les élections européennes un an après : bilan et perspectives

This study covers the one-year period since the first election of the European Assembly by universal suffrage, the results of which were rather misleading. The authors attempt to elaborate a conceptual framework capable of analyzing empirically the programs and ideological stands of the parties in the Strasbourg Chamber as they have evolved since the election. As a point of reference, the analysis has recourse to three socio-political cleavages which were observable throughout late European history or tend to appear in the modem context of political life; these include the divisions between 1) "bourgeois" and working class parties; 2) europeanist versus nationalist parties, and 3) industralist (or productivist) as opposed to "ecological" party formations. A detailed examination of both the interventions of euro-deputies in Assembly debates, and data recorded in several interviews with some deputies during this first year of their mandate, reflects not only the existing constellations of power and party alliances within the Assembly that reaffirm themselves on specific issues, but also the potential coalitions which may arise due to the rapidly changing political scene. These new coalitions, which tend to form more easily among members of different parties who share common interests with regard to social and economic issues, may eventually serve to overcome the traditional ideological divisions among parties. In terms of the near future, it doesn't matter so much whether the Euro-right or the Euro-left will succeed in imposing its majority in the Assembly, but whether the European Parliament itself, as an institution, will be able to demonstrate that it can have an effective and more representative voice in the formulation of EEC policies

Realizations of Differential Operators on Conic Manifolds with Boundary

We study the closed extensions (realizations) of differential operators subject to homogeneous boundary conditions on weighted L_p-Sobolev spaces over a manifold with boundary and conical singularities. Under natural ellipticity conditions we determine the domains of the minimal and the maximal extension. We show that both are Fredholm operators and give a formula for the relative index.Comment: 41 pages, 1 figur

Correlating the nanostructure of Al-oxide with deposition conditions and dielectric contributions of two-level systems in perspective of superconducting quantum circuits

This work is concerned with Al/Al-oxide(AlO$_{x}$)/Al-layer systems which are important for Josephson-junction-based superconducting devices such as quantum bits. The device performance is limited by noise, which has been to a large degree assigned to the presence and properties of two-level tunneling systems in the amorphous AlO$_{x}$ tunnel barrier. The study is focused on the correlation of the fabrication conditions, nanostructural and nanochemical properties and the occurrence of two-level tunneling systems with particular emphasis on the AlO$_{x}$-layer. Electron-beam evaporation with two different processes and sputter deposition were used for structure fabrication, and the effect of illumination by ultraviolet light during Al-oxide formation is elucidated. Characterization was performed by analytical transmission electron microscopy and low-temperature dielectric measurements. We show that the fabrication conditions have a strong impact on the nanostructural and nanochemical properties of the layer systems and the properties of two-level tunneling systems. Based on the understanding of the observed structural characteristics, routes are derived towards the fabrication of Al/AlO$_{x}$/Al-layers systems with improved properties.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figure

Uso del índice estandarizado de precipitación para la evaluación permanente del riesgo de inundaciones

p.229-234El riesgo de inundaciones así como los momentos críticos de ocurrencia son difíciles de evaluar y detectar. La disponibilidad y aplicación de índices adaptados a esos propósitos, pueden permitir un seguimiento permanente de las condiciones hídricas en zonas inundables y alertar sobre posibles ocurrencias, de manera de activar acciones de prevención y de disminución de efectos del fenómeno. El Indice Estandarizado de Precipitación (ISP) fue desarrollado para la evaluación y detección de sequías. Sin embargo, por las características del mismo puede ser aplicado también para la valoración de excesos hídricos. Este trabajo, motivado en las inundaciones periódicas que afectan el sur de la provincia de Córdoba, tiene como propósito analizar el potencial del ISP como herramienta para la evaluación de situaciones de inundación en esa región. Los resultados obtenidos del comportamiento del Indice previo a cada una de las tres inundaciones importantes analizadas, ocurridas en los últimos 25 años, explican satisfactoriamente las distintas situaciones de humedad y de riesgo. Esto permite promover el uso del mismo como un componente efectivo, de un sistema regional para el seguimiento de situaciones de riesgo de inundación