We investigate the relationship between black hole mass and bulge luminosity for AGNs with reverberation-based black hole mass measurements and bulge luminosities from two-dimensional decompositions of Hubble Space Telescope host galaxy images .
We find that the slope of the relationship for AGNs is 0.76 - 0.85 with an uncertainty of \sim 0.1 , somewhat shallower than the M _ { BH } \propto L ^ { 1.0 \pm 0.1 } relationship that has been fit to nearby quiescent galaxies with dynamical black hole mass measurements .
This is somewhat perplexing , as the AGN black hole masses include an overall scaling factor that brings the AGN M _ { BH } - \sigma _ { \star } relationship into agreement with that of quiescent galaxies .
We discuss biases that may be inherent to the AGN and quiescent galaxy samples and could cause the apparent inconsistency in the forms of their M _ { BH } - L _ { bulge } relationships .