Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2016
Much of the literature in housing and urban economics emphasizes the abundance of externalities, or neighborhood effects in cities, but little formal analysis has been conducted so far to take account of their impact on the allocation decisions of firms and consumers in urban space. This is true especially for analyses of the urban housing sector. In fact, the relevance of externalities on allocation decisions in this sector has been denied on theoretical grounds especially by Mills [1] and Muth[2] although empirical analyses, e.g. by Kain and Quigley [3], [4] or Bourne [5] tend to confirm their importance.
The present paper is a revised version of parts of a chapter of my PH.D. thesis finished in 1974 at the University of California at Berkerley, with the Support of Grant NSF-GK - 10656 X 3. The revision has been done while being a guest at CORE, Louvain. I would like to thank W. Alonso, J. Paelinck, M. Teitz, J. Thisse and P.P. Varaiya for helpful advice.