We report the results of a field experiment in which treated employers could not observe the compensation history of their job applicants. Treated employers responded by evaluating more applicants, and evaluating those applicants more intensively. They also responded by changing what kind of workers they evaluated: treated employers evaluated workers with 7% lower past average wages and hired workers with 16% lower past average wages. Conditional upon bargaining, workers hired by treated employers struck better wage bargains for themselves. Using a structural model of bidding and hiring, we find that the selection effects we observe would also occur in equilibrium.
We report the results of a field experiment in which treated employers could not observe the compensation history of their job applicants. Treated employers responded by evaluating more applicants, and evaluating those applicants more intensively. They also responded by changing what kind of workers they evaluated: treated employers evaluated workers with 7% lower past average wages and hired workers with 16% lower past average wages. Conditional upon bargaining, workers hired by treated employers struck better wage bargains for themselves. Using a structural model of bidding and hiring, we find that the selection effects we observe would also occur in equilibrium.
Platform marketplaces can potentially steer buyers to certain sellers by recommending or guaranteeing those sellers. Money-back guarantees—which create a direct financial stake for the platform in seller performance—might be particularly effective at steering as they align buyer and platform interests in creating a good match. We report the results of an experiment in which a platform marketplace—an online labor market—guaranteed select sellers for treated buyers. The presence of a guarantee strongly steered buyers to these guaranteed sellers, but offering guarantees did not increase sales overall, suggesting financial risk was not determinative for the marginal buyer. This preference for guaranteed sellers was not the result of their lower financial risk, but rather because buyers viewed the platform’s decision to guarantee as informative about relative seller quality. Indeed, a follow-up experiment showed that simply recommending the sellers that the platform would have guaranteed was equally effective at steering buyers. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.
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