Jesse Silbert

Hi! I am a fifth year Ph.D. student at the Princeton University Department of Economics interested in industrial organization, market design, labor markets, online platforms, and matching theory.

In addition to economics, I am passionate about rock climbing, weird music, and good food.

Email: jesseas@princeton.edu

Research:

Learning in Thick Markets: Recommendation and Communication on an Online Job Platform (with Anaïs Galdin). [Work in progress]

Abstract:

Agents in two-sided matching markets use a mix of platform-guided recommendation and decentralized communication to learn about potential matches before matching. This paper studies whether, and how, market designers can use recommendation systems to incentivize effective communication between potential matches in the context of an online freelance labor market for tasks. With data from a major international online labor market, we build and estimate a novel model of freelancing supply and demand, in which firms post single-task online jobs they wish to outsource, freelancers submit monetary bids and cover letters for those jobs, the platform algorithmically ranks the bids on each job, and firms, seeing these recommendations, choose which freelancer to hire. In our model, freelancers pay up-front effort costs when writing cover letters, and the more writing effort they expend, the more informative the resulting signal is. However, when freelancers face congestion, they lower their equilibrium writing effort, hampering firms’ abilities to find the worker with the highest match quality. We use our estimated model to investigate how the platform could redesign the recommender system to lower congestion and thus incentivize more communication effort and improve the quality of realized matches. Specifically we study the equilibrium effects of a recommender system that promotes bids that exhibit more effort.

Extended Abstract

Job Matching without Price Discrimination (with Wilbur Townsend). [Previously circulated as “Stable Matching in Monopsonistic Labor Markets”]

Abstract:

In many labor markets, firms do not price discriminate among their workers. In this paper, we study how a labor market with uniform salaries matches workers to jobs. To do so, we construct a job matching model in which each firm views workers as interchangeable and must pay all its workers the same salary. While an efficient stable outcome always exists, inefficient outcomes can be stable as well. Workers’ preferred stable outcome is efficient. In contrast, firms prefer inefficient stable outcomes in which they pay lower salaries. Though a strategyproof mechanism that implements an efficient stable outcome can elicit how workers value employment, it cannot elicit firms’ production technologies.