Job Search and Hiring with Limited Information about Workseekers’ Skills

Networking Skills and Hiring Managers

Holdup and hiring discrimination with search friction

A holdup problem on workers’ skill investment arises when employers can adopt discriminatory hiring norm to extract higher than socially optimal profit. In such an economy, productivity (skills) and non-productivity oriented characteristics (discrimination) both matter when determining which worker has priority. The resulting firms’ preference is an intertwined ranking order, by virtue of which...

Matching Academic Hiring Institutions and Job Candidates

Learning about Job Search: A Field Experiment with Job Seekers in Germany*

We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the German labor market to investigate how information provision affects job seekers’ employment prospects and labor market outcomes. Individuals assigned to the treatment group of our experiment received a brochure that informed them about job search strategies and the consequences of unemployment, and motivated them to actively look for new employm...

Cooperation among strangers with limited information about reputation

The amount of institutional intervention necessary to secure efficiency-enhancing cooperation in markets and organizations, in circumstances where interactions take place among essentially strangers, depends critically on the amount of information informal reputation mechanisms need transmit. Models based on subgame perfection find that the information necessary to support cooperation is recurs...