Black-hole masses are tightly correlated with the stellar velocity dispersion of host galaxies, and slightly less-well correlated with the bulge luminosities; the M.-a relation predicts fewer massive black holes than does the M.-L relation This is because the L-a in currently available black-hole samples is inconsistent with that in the samples from which the distributions of L or a are based This suggests that current black-hole samples are biased and that the M.-a and M.-L relations currently in the literature are also biased from their intrinsic values. Our analysis suggests that the bias in the M.-a relation is likely to be small, whereas the M.-L relation is biased towards predicting more massive black holes for a given luminosity.
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