addi- tional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agents additional share-her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000-is a mere $150. If you earn $9,400 while she earns only $150, maybe your incentives arent aligned after all. (Especially when shes the one paying for the ads and doing all the work.) Is the agent willing to put out all that extra time, money, and energy for just $150? Theres one way to find out: measure the difference between the sales data for houses that belong to real-estate agents themselves and the houses they sold on behalf of clients. Using the data from the sales of those 100,000 Chicago homes, and controlling for any number of variables-location, age and quality of the house, aesthetics, and so on-it turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house. When she sells her own house, an agent holds out for the best offer; when she sells yours, she pushes you to take the first decent offer that comes along. Like a stockbroker churning commissions, she wants to make deals and make them fast. Why not? Her share of a better offer-$150-is too puny an incentive to encourage her to do otherwise.       Of all the truisms about politics, one is held to be truer than the rest: money buys elections. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Corzine-these are but a few recent, dramatic examples of the truism at work. (Disregard for a moment the contrary examples of Howard Dean, Steve Forbes, Michael Huffington, and especially Thomas Golisano, who over the course of three gubernatorial elec- tions in New York spent $93 million of his own money and won 4 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively, of the vote.) Most