Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Worth the Effort: Measuring and Predicting Investment in a Costly Application Process

在公司从求职者中招聘员工之前，他们必须首先吸引到合适的候选人来申请这份工作。从工人的角度来看，申请工作需要时间和精力，有时甚至需要花钱（在合法的州）。虽然这些费用是保证的，但申请（工作机会）的预期结果通常不是；因此，工人们必须权衡实际的、当前的成本与申请的预期未来收益。这个项目将求职视为一种投资，并研究影响一个人投资决策的因素——比如他们承担风险的意愿，或者他们对未来回报的乐观程度——可能也会影响他们的求职决定。公司可能会认为他们吸引了所有最优秀的求职者，但实际上他们却在劝阻那些认为申请风险太大或不值得花时间的合适求职者（原因与求职者的才能和技能无关）。例如，研究表明，平均而言，女性比男性更不愿意冒险。这意味着，当一份工作申请的结果不确定或被选中的可能性很低时，女性比男性更不可能在申请过程中“投资”，尤其是在这个过程非常昂贵的情况下。这个项目通过实验测试了改变申请工作的成本是否会影响决定申请的人，以及性别、冒险意愿和工作性质等因素是否会影响人们因高申请成本而气馁的程度。从这个项目中收集的数据应该可以帮助公司改善他们的招聘流程，以吸引最好的候选人，减少无意的歧视。这一证据也可以用于应用程序（和应用程序成本）很常见的其他环境，例如高等教育。该项目的主要目标是研究表面上与工作效率无关的特征如何影响个人支付申请成本的意愿。这个项目是围绕一个实验设计的，在这个实验中，参与者将面临随机变化的申请完成一项任务的费用。多种类型的任务将提供给受试者。一些科目将只面临最小的努力成本，而另一些科目将面临更高的努力成本或货币成本。任何申请任务的受试者都将被要求对他们自己获得工作机会的可能性下注，以引出他们的期望。无论申请决定如何，所有受试者都将被调查他们的技能、信仰和品味，以及性别等身份特征。研究人员将利用收集到的参与者申请哪些任务的数据来估计他们决定申请工作的概率模型。该模型将包括任务类型、应用成本的性质和大小，以及可观察到的个人特征。另一组参与者将被要求审查申请，并选择他们认为最有可能成功完成他们申请的任务的个人，然后联系被选中的申请人完成任务。该项目的第二部分旨在测试改变申请成本的性质是否会影响申请人的分布或招聘人员确定最佳候选人的能力。总的来说，该项目旨在通过实验测试几种解释，来解释为什么同样合格的候选人在不同的工作机会中可能排序不同，从而为求职文献做出贡献。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Before firms can hire workers from a pool of applicants, they must attract the right candidates to apply for the job in the first place. On the worker’s side, applying for a job takes time and effort, and (in states where this is legal) sometimes even costs money. While these costs are guaranteed, the desired outcome of an application (a job offer) is usually not; so workers must weigh the real, present cost against the expected future benefit of applying. This project frames applying for a job as a type of investment, and studies how the factors that influence a person’s investment decisions -- such as their willingness to take risks, or how optimistic they are about future returns -- might also affect the decision to apply for a job. Firms might think they are attracting all the best candidates for the job when they are actually discouraging suitable candidates who think applying is too risky or not worth their time (for reasons that have nothing to do with the candidate’s talents and skills). For example, research shows that women on average are less willing to take risks than men are. This implies that, when the outcome of a job application is uncertain or the likelihood of being selected is low, women would be less likely than men to “invest” in the application process, especially if that process is very costly. This project experimentally tests whether changing the cost of applying for a job affects who decides to apply, and whether factors such as gender, willingness to take risks, and the nature of the job affect the degree to which someone gets discouraged by a high application cost. The data gathered from this project should help firms improve their hiring processes to attract the best candidates and reduce unintentional discrimination. This evidence could also be used in other contexts where applications (and application costs) are common, such as higher education.The primary goal of this project is to study how characteristics ostensibly unrelated to on-the-job productivity affect an individual’s willingness to pay an application cost. The project is designed around an experiment in which participants will face random variation in the cost of applying to complete a task for payment. Multiple types of tasks will be offered to subjects. Some subjects will face only a minimal effort cost to apply, while others will face either a higher effort cost or a monetary cost. Any subjects who apply for a task will be asked to bet on their own likelihood of receiving an offer, in order to elicit their expectations. All subjects, regardless of application decisions, will be surveyed on their skills, their beliefs and tastes, and identity characteristics such as gender. The researchers will use the data gathered on which participants applied for which tasks to estimate a probability model of the decision to apply for a job. This model will incorporate the type of task, the nature and magnitude of the application cost, and observable individual characteristics. A separate group of participants will be asked to review applications and select individuals they see as most likely to succeed in the task(s) they applied for, and then the selected applicants will be contacted to complete the task. This second part of the project is designed to test whether changing the nature of an application cost affects the distribution of applicants or a recruiter’s ability to identify the best candidates for a job. Overall, the project aims to contribute to the job search literature by experimentally testing several explanations for why equally qualified candidates may not sort identically across job opportunities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.