TUILES: Tuesday Informal Lunchtime Seminars Fall 2014
Tuesday, November 25th
KMC 8-170
Lunch will be available at 12:15 pm. The seminar begins at 12:30 pm.
"Inefficiencies in Online Labor Markets"
Marios Kokkodis
In an online labor marketplace (OLM) employers post jobs, receive worker applications, and make hiring decisions. Because of the natural heterogeneity that appears in task categories, skills, and the latent abilities of workers and employers, these markets stuffer from a series of inefficiencies. In my dissertation, I focus on understanding these inefficiencies and propose solutions. In particular, I study three problems: (1) How do employers make hiring decisions?, (2) How should workers expand their skillset? and (3) How does past experience transfer to new tasks?
For each one of these problems I propose, build and evaluate solutions on a unique dataset of more than 3.5 million job applications (hundreds of thousands of completed tasks) from a major OLM. My work facilitates (1) employers to make better-informed and faster hiring decisions, (2) workers to build up their demand and (3) the marketplace to increase its transaction volume.