Seminar – Experience Markets: An Application to Outsourcing and Hiring

Dr Catherine Thomas, London School of Economics

Employers in a large online global labour market learn their value for the market only through experimenting. Early experience affects employer selection into posting further jobs, increases the perceived value of using the market, and alters how employers evaluate individual workers. The majority of employers quickly learn that the market is less valuable to them that their next best alternative and exit the market. Participation decisions are relatively insensitive to variation in the hourly wage bids that employers receive and to learning-by-doing in the market. Low market take-up rates are consistent with there being unanticipated and heterogeneous employer costs of reorganising to coordinate remote and fragmented stages of production.

Speaker bio

Dr Catherine Thomas is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at LSE. She is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a research associate at the Centre for Economic Performance.

Before coming to LSE, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Columbia Business School. Her PhD is in Business Economics from Harvard University and she has an MA in Economics from the University of Edinburgh. She worked for three years at McKinsey and Company before starting her PhD.

Catherine’s research focuses on three aspects of international economic integration: (1) how firms engage in offshoring, (2) how firms make outsourcing decisions, and (3), the performance consequence of firms’ organisational and ownership structures. She has published papers in Economics and Management journals and also serves on several editorial boards.