Harmful signaling in matching markets

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kushnir, Alexey
• 署名单位: University of Zurich
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2013.04.002
• 发表日期: 2013
• 页码: 209-218
• 关键词: Signaling; cheap talk; matching

摘要

Several labor markets, including the job market for new Ph.D. economists, have recently developed formal signaling mechanisms. We show that such mechanisms are harmful for some environments. While signals transmit previously unavailable information, they also facilitate information asymmetry that leads to coordination failures. In particular, we consider a two-sided matching game of incomplete information between firms and workers. Each worker has either the same typical known preferences with probability close to one or atypical idiosyncratic preferences with the complementary probability close to zero. Firms have known preferences over workers. We show that under some technical condition if at least three firms are responsive to some worker's signal, the introduction of signaling strictly decreases the expected number of matches. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.