Job Seekers’ Beliefs and Preferences over Wages and Benefits: Experimental Evidence from Online Job Boards

We estimate how strongly job seekers value wages and job benefits, how well informed they are about compensation differences across firms, and how much they update beliefs when shown such information. In a field experiment, we randomly embed wage and benefit information from an employer-review platform on job ads for 265,000 users of a Swiss job-board network. Revealed-preference estimates suggest a 1% higher posted wage increases clicks to view and engage with the ad by 0.4%. A conceptual framework decomposes this elasticity into preferences, prior knowledge, and belief updating, identified through a belief-elicitation experiment with users from the same job boards. We find job seekers underestimate wage differences across jobs by half, know little about benefit differences, and update beliefs partially. Accounting for these information frictions, the implied own-wage elasticity of applications is 2.5–2.9. Among twelve benefits shown, job seekers value four significantly: a company car (10% of wages), work from home (8%), firm-sponsored childcare (6%), and a parking spot (4%). The average job offers benefits worth 11% of wages. Because higher-paying jobs offer more benefits, total compensation inequality exceeds wage inequality.