The concept of utility has carried two different meanings in its long history. As Bentham (1789) used it, utility refers to the experiences of pleasure and pain, the "sovereign masters" that "point out what we ought to do, as well as determine what we shall do." In modern decision research, however, the utility of outcomes refers to their weight in decisions: utility is inferred from observed choices and is in turn used to explain choices. To distinguish the two notions I refer to Bentham's concept as experienced utility and to the modern usage as decision utility. Experienced utility is the focus of this chapter. Contrary to the behaviorist position that led to the abandonment of Bentham's notion (Loewenstein, 1992), the claim made here is that experienced utility can be usefully measured. The chapter presents arguments to support that claim, and speculates about its implications.This essay has three main goals: (1) to present a detailed analysis of the concept of experienced utility and of the relation between the pleasure and pain of moments and the utility of more extended episodes; (2) to argue that experienced utility is best measured by momentbased methods that assess the experience of the present; (3) to develop a moment-based conception of an aspect of human well-being that I will call "objective happiness." The chapter also introduces several unfamiliar concepts that will be used in some of the chapters that follow.Pleasure and pain are attributes of a moment of experience, but the outcomes that people value extend over time. It is therefore necessary to establish a concept of experienced utility that applies to temporally extended outcomes. Two approaches to this task will be compared here.(i) The memory-based approach accepts the subject's retrospective evaluations of past episodes and situations as valid data. The remembered utility of an episode of experience is defined by the subject's retrospective global assessment of it.(ii) The moment-based approach derives the experienced utility of an episode from real-time measures of the pleasure and pain that the subject experienced during that episode. Moment-utility refers to the valence (good or bad) and to the intensity (mild to extreme) of current affective or hedonic experience. The total utility of an episode is derived exclusively from the record of moment-utilities during that episode. for helpful comments. I also thank Peter Wakker for allowing me to use ideas and sentences that we had fashioned together, and Peter McGraw for extremely valuable assistance and useful suggestions.

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This paper tests whether commercial real estate markets (both exchange-traded and non-exchange-traded) are integrated with stock markets using multifactor asset pricing models. The results support the hypothesis that the market for exchange-traded real estate companies, including REITs, is integrated with the market for exchange-traded (non-real-estate) stocks. Moreover, the degree of integration has significantly increased during the 1990s. However, when appraisal-based returns (adjusted for smoothing) are used to construct real estate portfolio returns, the results fail to support the integration hypothesis, although this may reflect the inability of these estimated private market returns to accurately proxy for commercial real estate returns. Interestingly, the growth rate in real per capita consumption is consistently priced in both commercial real estate markets and stock markets, whereas previous studies have found mixed evidence on the role of consumption in explaining "ex ante" stock returns. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

The absolute location of each real estate parcel in an urban housing market has a unique location-value signature. Accessibility indices, distant gradients and locational dummies cannot fully account for the influence of absolute location on the market price of housing because there are an indeterminable number of externalities (local and nonlocal) influencing a given property at a given location. Furthermore, the degree to which externalities affect real estate values is not only unique at each location but highly variable over space. Hence, absolute location must be viewed as interactive with other determinants of housing value. We present an interactive variables approach and test its ability to explain price variations in an urban residential housing market. The statistical evidence suggests that the value of location, as embodied in the selling price of housing units, may not be separable from other determinants of value. It is recommended that housing valuation models, therefore, be specified to allow site, structural and other independent attributes to interact with absolute location-{x, y} coordinates-when accounting for intraurban variation in the market price of residential housing. This approach is especially useful when estimating the value of housing for geographic areas where very little is known a priori about the neighborhoods or submarkets. Copyright 2003 by the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association

Option-based models of mortgage default posit that the central measure of default risk is the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. We argue, however, that an unrecognized problem with extending the basic option model to existing multifamily and commercial mortgages is that key variables in the option model are endogenous to the loan origination and property sale process. This endogeneity implies, among other things, that no empirical relationship may be observed between default and LTV. Since lenders may require lower LTVs in order to mitigate risk, mortgages with low and moderate LTVs may be as likely to default as those with high LTVs. Mindful of this risk endogeneity and its empirical implications, we examine the default experience of 495 fixed-rate multifamily mortgage loans securitized by the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) during the period 1991-1996. The extensive nature of the data supports multivariate analysis of default incidence in a number of respects not possible in previous studies. Consistent with our expectations, we find that LTV evidences no relationship to default incidence, while the strongest predictors of default are property characteristics, including three-digit ZIP code location and initial cash flow as reflected in the debt coverage ratio. The latter results are particularly interesting in that they dominated the influence of postorigination changes in the local economy. Copyright 2002 by the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association..

This is the first paper to examine how the COVID-19 shock transmitted from the asset markets to capital markets. Using a novel measure of the exposure of commercial real estate (CRE) portfolios to the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases (GeoCOVID), we find a one-standard-deviation increase in GeoCOVID on day t-1 is associated with a 0.24 to 0.93 percentage points decrease in abnormal returns over 1- to 3-day windows. There is substantial variation across property types. Local and state policy interventions helped to moderate the negative return impact of GeoCOVID. However, there is little evidence that reopenings affected the performance of CRE markets.

This paper investigates the return performance of publicly traded real estate companies. The analysis spans the 1984 to 1999 time period and includes return data on over 600 companies in 28 countries. The return data reveal a substantial amount of variation in mean real estate returns and standard deviations across countries. Moreover, standard Treynor ratios, which scale country excess returns by the estimated βeta on the world wealth portfolio, also reveal substantial variation across countries in excess real estate returns per unit of systematic risk. However, when we estimate Jensen's alphas using both single and multifactor specifications, we detect little evidence of abnormal, risk-adjusted returns at the country level. We do, however, find evidence of a strong world-wide factor in international real estate returns. Furthermore, even after controlling for the effects of world-wide systematic risk, an orthogonalized country-specific factor is highly significant. This suggests that real estate securities may provide international diversification opportunities.

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