Curriculum Vitae
Alexey Kushnir |
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Placement Director: Neil Wallace
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Graduate Secretary & Placement Assistant: Lynn Sebulsky (814)865-1458 lms50@psu.edu |
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Curriculum Vitae |
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CITIZENSHIP: |
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EDUCATION:
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PH.D. THESIS:
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Job Market Papers Abstract My job market papers examine a natural signaling mechanism in two-sided matching markets between firms and workers. We consider a game of incomplete information. Each worker can send a limited number of costless signals to firms indicating her interest in positions there; workers send signals simultaneously. Then, each firm makes an offer to at most one worker; firms make offers simultaneously. Finally, workers choose at most one offer from those available to them. Recently, the American Economic Association has introduced such signaling option in the job market for new Ph.D. economists. In a similar setting, some online dating sites (i.e., www.cupid.com) allow agents to send virtual roses to potential partners as signals of their interest. The two papers study the same model and differ only in how agents’ preferences are assumed to be distributed. In the first, agents’ preferences are quite dispersed. In the second, agents’ preferences are tightly distributed. The influence of costless signaling in the two environments is quite different. The paper “Signaling in Matching Markets” (written jointly with Peter Coles and Muriel Niederle) analyzes markets with firm segments. Workers agree on the ranking of firms across “segments,” but have idiosyncratic (and uniformly distributed) preferences within segments. For instance, all workers may agree as to which firms are in the “top five” segment and which are in the “six to ten” segment, etc., but may disagree as to the exact ranking within a segment. Firm preferences over workers are idiosyncratic (and uniformly distributed). We show that, on average, introducing a signaling mechanism increases both the expected number of matches as well as the expected welfare of workers for this environment (more precisely, any non-babbling equilibrium that satisfies the refinement D1 of Cho and Kreps has these properties). The welfare of firms, on the other hand, changes ambiguously. In addition, the signaling mechanism adds the most value for markets wherein the number of firms and the number of workers are of roughly the same magnitude. Furthermore, the optimal number of signals—the number of signals that maximizes the expected increase in the number of matches—increases when workers have more positions to fill. Finally, additional periods of interaction between firms and workers decrease the impact of signaling. By contrast, the paper “Harmful Signaling in Matching Markets” shows that there are instances when preference signaling is actually harmful for matching markets (more precisely, the expected number of matches is weakly smaller in any equilibrium of the game with signals than in the unique equilibrium of the game with no signals; moreover, there is an equilibrium where this comparison is strict). Workers have almost aligned preferences over firms: each worker has “typical” commonly known preferences with probability close to one and “atypical” idiosyncratic preferences with the complementary probability close to zero. Firms have some commonly known preferences over workers. Though signals transmit previously unavailable information, they also facilitate information asymmetry. Prior to the signaling, all firms have identical beliefs about worker preferences. However, after the signals are received they may have diverse beliefs. This disparity in beliefs leads to coordination failure. As a result, the introduction of a signaling mechanism may decrease the total number of matches and the welfare of agents. The papers together suggest that signals play two important roles in match formation: they transmit information and they facilitate information asymmetry. When there is a small amount of information about agent preferences available, as in “Signaling in Matching Markets,” information transmission plays a more important role in match formation. However, when there is almost complete information about agent preferences, as in “Harmful Signaling in Matching Markets,” the introduction of signals may lead to coordination failure. |
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