Interviewing in Two-Sided Matching Markets

28 Pages Posted: 29 Apr 2009 Last revised: 10 Oct 2022

See all articles by Robin S. Lee

Robin S. Lee

Harvard University - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Michael Schwarz

Yahoo! - Yahoo! Research Labs; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Date Written: April 2009

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.

Suggested Citation

Lee, Robin S. and Schwarz, Michael, Interviewing in Two-Sided Matching Markets (April 2009). NBER Working Paper No. w14922, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1394829

Robin S. Lee

Harvard University - Department of Economics ( email )

1805 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) ( email )

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Michael Schwarz (Contact Author)

Yahoo! - Yahoo! Research Labs ( email )

Sunnyvale, CA 94089

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States