Home Bias in Hiring: Evidence from an Online Labor Market

We study the nature of home bias in online employment, wherein the employers prefer workers from their own home countries. Using a unique large-scale dataset from a major online labor market containing employers’ consideration set of workers and their ultimate selection of workers, we first estimate employers’ home bias in their online employment decisions. Moreover, we find that employers from countries with high traditional values, lower diversity, and smaller user base (or population size), tend to have a stronger home bias. Further, we disentangle two types of home bias, i.e., statistical and taste-based, using a quasi-natural experiment wherein the platform introduces a monitoring system to facilitate employers to easily observe workers’ progress in time-based projects. After matching comparable fixed-price projects as a control group using coarsened exact matching, our difference-in-difference estimations show that the home bias in online employment is primarily driven by statistical discrimination

Los siete pecados capitales: una propuesta simbólica en joyería contemporánea.

[ES] Los siete pecados capitales: una propuesta simbólica en joyería contemporánea es un proyecto que consta de una serie constituida por distintas joyas las cuales representan un pecado capital, formando así una colección de siete anillos, todos realizados mediante la técnica de microfusión. El trabajo adaptará cada uno de los anillos para representarlo con características de alguna mitología, hechos representativo de acontecimientos históricos o algún hecho con el que nos sintamos identificados en la vida cotidiana relacionados con cada pecado.[EN] The seven deadly sins: a symbolic proposal in contemporary jewelery is a project that consists of a series made up of different jewels where which one represents a capital sin, forming a collection of seven rings, all made using the microfusion technique. The work will adapt each of the rings to represent it with characteristics of some mythology, facts representative of historical events or some fact withwhich we feel identified in our daily life related to each sin.Chen, Y. (2021). Los siete pecados capitales: una propuesta simbólica en joyería contemporánea. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/173282TFG

Moral Hazards and Effects of IT-enabled Monitoring Systems in Online Labor Markets

This paper investigates how IT-enabled monitoring systems mitigate moral hazard in an online labor market and their effect on market competition. We exploit a quasi-experiment at Freelancer when it introduced an IT-enabled monitoring system in 2015. We use a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to identify the treatment effect of the monitoring system on employer contractor choice, market competition, and employer surplus. We found that the IT-enabled monitoring system lowers the employers’ willingness to pay the reputation premiums. Meanwhile, comparing the trend of the control group, the IT-enabled monitoring system raised the employer surplus in hourly projects and increased the number of bids. Our result suggests that IT-enabled monitoring systems have a significant effect on alleviating moral hazards, reducing agency costs, and facilitating market competition

Home Bias in Online Employment

We study the nature of home bias in online employment, wherein the employer prefers workers from his/her own home country. Using a unique large-scale dataset from one of the major online labor platforms, we identify employers’ home bias in their online employment decisions. Moreover, we investigate the cause of employers’ home bias using a quasi-natural experiment wherein the platform introduces a monitoring system to facilitate employers to keep track of workers’ progress in time-based projects. After matching comparable fixed-price projects as a control group using propensity score matching, our difference-in-difference estimations show that the home bias does exist in online employment, and at least 54.0% of home bias is driven by statistical discrimination

Measuring Product Type With Dynamics of Online Product Review Variance

The concept of “product type” (experience versus search product) is increasingly important in business research and practice. However, it is not defined or measured precisely in the Internet age due to significantly lower search cost and changes in consumer information search behavior resulting from reliance on information and communications technology. We take advantage of the greatly available micro level online word-of-mouth data and infer product type based on statistical properties of online word of mouth (specifically, online product reviews). We draw on the theories from statistics and literature on informational content of online product reviews to analytically propose a mechanism to classify products. We further collect archival data to categorize the products and services. Implications of this analytical tool and empirical findings for research, theory and managerial practice are discussed

Effect of Auction Design on Bidder Entry: Evidence from An Online Labor Market

We propose that auction duration and auction description are two important auction design parameters that could serve as screening mechanisms for quality in online auctions. Using data from an online labor matching platform that connects buyers with IT service vendors, we examine the effects of auction duration and auction descriptions on auction outcomes (i.e., number of bids, bidder quality, bidding price) and project outcomes (i.e., project being contracted and being completed). Our empirical analyses show that, in buyer-determined reverse auctions of online labor matching, auctions with a longer duration and a longer description attract more bids, but they also attract more low quality bidders with less experience and lower completion rate, and hence result in a lower probability of successful contracting and completion of software service projects. Our research provides empirical evidence highlighting the strategic roles of auction design parameters like auction duration and descriptions as a potential screening mechanism for online labor matching platforms

Digital Nudging for Online Social Sharing: Evidence from A Randomized Field Experiment

This study investigates the effectiveness of digital nudging for users’ social sharing of online platform content. In collaboration with a leading career and education online platform, we conducted a large-scale randomized experiment of digital nudging using website popups. Grounding on the Social Capital Theory and the individual motivation mechanism, we proposed and tested four kinds of nudging messages: simple request, monetary incentive, relational capital, and cognitive capital. We find that nudging messages with monetary incentive, relational and cognitive capital framings lead to increase in social sharing behavior, while nudging message with simple request decreases social sharing, comparing to the control group without nudging. This study contributes to the prior research on digital nudging by providing causal evidence of effective nudging for online social sharing behavior. The findings of this study also provide valuable guidelines for the optimal design of online platforms to effectively nudge/encourage social sharing in practice

LHC Reach for Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking Models Via Prompt Photon Channels

We evaluate the supersymmetry reach of the Large Hadron Collider within the gauge-mediated low energy supersymmetry breaking framework, assuming that a neutralino is the second lightest sparticle and that it decays promptly into a gravitino which escapes detection. We find that the maximum reach is obtained via a search for inclusive \gamma\gamma+\eslt events coming dominantly from chargino and neutralino production. Assuming an integrated luminosity of 10~$fb^{-1}$, we find that LHC experiments will be able to probe values of the model parameter \Lambda \alt 400 TeV, corresponding to $m_{\tg} \leq 2.8$ TeV. A measure of the model parameter $\Lambda$ may be possible from the photon $p_T$ spectrum.Comment: 10 page Revtex file plus 4 EPS figure