Buyer Uncertainty About Seller Capacity: Causes, Consequences, and a Partial Solution

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Horton, John J.
• 署名单位: New York University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2018.3116
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 3518-3540
• 关键词: economics; behavior and behavioral decision making; IT policy and management; electronic commerce; electronic markets and auctions

摘要

Employers in an online labor market often pursue workers with little capacity to take on more work. The pursuit of low-capacity workers is consequential, as these workers are more likely to reject employer inquires, causing a reduction in the probability that a job opening is ultimately filled. In an attempt to shift more employer attention to workers with greater capacity, the market-designing platform examined in this paper introduced a new signaling feature into the market. It was effective, in that when a worker signaled having high capacity, he or she received more invitations from employers, rejected a smaller fraction of those invitations, quoted lower prices to do the work, and was more likely to be hired. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the signaling feature alone could increase market surplus by as much as 6%, both by increasing the number of matches formed and by helping to allocate projects to workers with lower costs.