Matching Markets with Signals

Alexey Kushnir ()

No 2009.39, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: A costless signaling mechanism has been proposed as a device to improve welfare in decentralized two-sided matching markets. An example of such an environment is a job market for new Ph.D. economists. We study a market game of incomplete information between firms and workers and show that costless signaling is actually harmful in some matching markets. Specifically, if agents have very similar preferences, signaling lessens the total number of matches and the welfare of firms, as well as it affects ambiguously the welfare of workers. These results run contrary to previous findings that costless signaling facilitates match formation.

Keywords: Matching Markets; Signaling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://feem-media.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/w ... oads/NDL2009-039.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Harmful Signaling in Matching Markets (2010)
Working Paper: Matching Markets with Signals (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fem:femwpa:2009.39

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alberto Prina Cerai ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).