Working Paper: NBER ID: w14922
Authors: Robin S. Lee; Michael Schwarz
Abstract: We introduce the interview assignment problem, which generalizes the one-to-one matching model of Gale and Shapley (1962) by introducing a stage of costly information acquisition. Firms learn preferences over workers via costly interviews. Even if all firms and workers conduct the same number of interviews, realized unemployment depends also on the extent to which agents share common interviewing partners. We introduce the concept of overlap that captures this notion, and prove that unemployment is minimized with perfect overlap: i.e., if two firms interview any common worker, they interview the exact same set of workers.
Keywords: Two-sided matching; Interview assignment; Overlap; Unemployment
JEL Codes: C78; D85; J01
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| structure of interview assignments (C78) | unemployment (J64) |
| perfect overlap (D41) | unemployment (J64) |
| interview structure (C83) | hiring likelihood (M51) |
| overlap (Y60) | expected profits (D33) |
| overlap (Y60) | unemployment rates (J64) |
| firms' preferences (D21) | hiring outcomes (M51) |