It has been argued that the use of personal networks in the hiring process has a positive influence on the wages of referred individuals. However, the value of recommendations to the employer varies according to the type of vacancy to be filled and the provider of information on job applicants....

We examine a new class of games, which we call social games, where players not only choose strategies but also choose with whom they play. A group of players who are dissatisfied with the play of their current partners can join together and play a new equilibrium. This imposes new refinements on...

We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are considerably more trusting and...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

Consider Becker's (1973) classic static matching model, with output a stochastic function of unobserved types. Assume symmetric incomplete information about types, and thus commonly observed Bayesian posteriors. Matching is then assortative in these `reputations' if expected output is...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favour of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

Labor contracts that result in dismissals are quite common in the real world. The question that arises is why employers do not just offer reduced wages instead of asking workers with low realized productivity to leave. This paper argues that such behavior can be explained by workers'...

This paper introduces and applies a method for estimating workers' marginal willingness to pay for job attributes employing data on job search activity. Worker's willingness to pay for the remaining duration of the employment contract is derived. We provide evidence that workers attach...

We study employment, employee effort, wages and profit sharing when firms face stochastic revenue shocks and when base wages and profit shares are determined through collective bargaining. The negotiated profit share depends positively on the relative bargaining power of the trade union and has...

Monthly panel (1998-2003) data from regional labor offices in Latvia are used to analyze the matching process in a high unemployment – low labor demand environment and to evaluate the impact of active labor market policy programs on outflows from unemployment. Results suggest that the hiring...