Charles Pébereau

Research

(Mis)Perceptions of the Labor Market (pdf) - with Pierre Deschamps, Morgane Hoffmann, Morgane Laouénan, and Louis-Pierre Lepage

Abstract: Workers and firms make costly decisions based on what they think is valued in the labor market. We study whether employers and workers hold accurate perceptions about the preferences of others through a series of incentivized field experiments on one of Europe’s largest freelance platform. First, we elicit employer and worker preferences over a rich set of worker, employer, and job characteristics using randomized worker profile and job offer evaluations. Second, we elicit beliefs about these preferences, from the other side of the market as well as from competitors, and we test their accuracy. We document substantial perception gaps about labor market preferences on both sides of the market, including about the value of posted wages, human capital, market reputation, job amenities like remote work, and demographic characteristics. Third, we implement a personalized information treatment to correct these gaps and show that it changes participants’ market behavior. To help interpret our results, we develop a theoretical framework showing how the perception gaps we document can distort both pricing and investment decisions. Consistent with the model, we find that workers and firms with larger perception gaps have worse market outcomes. Our findings highlight an important source of information frictions in labor markets and their economic consequences.

None of your business! Efficient disclosure policies with heterogeneous audiences (pdf)

Abstract: This paper studies the efficient disclosure of performance information by a principal about an agent with career concerns vis-à-vis heterogeneous employers. The information is more predictive of the agent's talent for jobs similar to the one she was evaluated for. The principal trades off effort incentives and the agent's intertemporal welfare. In equilibrium, the principal discloses information differentially, and information structures are non-decreasing in job similarity. Incentivizing higher effort requires disclosing more information, in priority to employers who value it the most. The model can rationalize laws differentially restricting access to worker and consumer personal data, and inform privacy debates.

Barriers to real-time electricity pricing: Evidence from New Zealand  - with  Kevin Remmy (pdf) 

International Journal of Industrial Organization 2023, 89, 102979

Abstract: This paper studies the introduction of real-time electricity pricing in the New Zealand residential retail market to understand why its market share remained below 1.25%. We use rich panel data of all retail switches between 2014 and 2018 and an unexpected wholesale price spike to study adoption and attrition. Exploiting the staggered roll-out of real-time pricing in different locations we find that attrition decreases with experience. We also find that prospective adopters are present biased. The combination of these findings explains why adoption stalled and shows that wholesale price spikes pose a serious threat to widespread adoption of real-time pricing.