The Moral Principles of Buyer Legitimacy: Perceptions of Who Should Be Allowed to Buy in the American Housing Market

• In Event: 41007 - Housing as an Asset

Abstract

The ability to pay is the primary requirement for making purchases, but sometimes this money-first sentiment is contested in markets for goods and services considered sacred or scarce. Which criteria, then, do people believe should determine access to such purchases? Using a pre-registered conjoint experiment (N=1,979), I investigate what Americans perceive is fair in terms of who ought to be able to buy a house, a good that is sacred and increasingly scarce. The experiment shows that individuals from across the political spectrum believe that Americans purchasing primary residences should be favored over corporate or foreign buyers—even when the latter offer as much as twice the amount. Open-ended responses reveal three moral principles guiding these judgments: use-value, communitarianism, and citizenship. These findings highlight a stark misalignment between Americans’ normative views of how the housing market ought to operate and the prevailing free market logic that currently structures it.

Author

• Angela He, Stanford University