A costless signaling mechanism has been proposed as a device to improve welfare in decentralized two-sided matching markets. An example of such an environment is a job market for new Ph.D. economists. We study a market game of incomplete information between firms and workers and show that costless signaling is actually harmful in some matching markets. Specifically, if agents have very similar preferences, signaling lessens the total number of matches and the welfare of firms, as well as it affects ambiguously the welfare of workers. These results run contrary to previous findings that costless signaling facilitates match formation.
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Paper provided by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in its series Working Papers with number
2009.39.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Hector Chade & Lones Smith, .
"Simultaneous Search,"
Working Papers
2168591, Department of Economics, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
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