JOB MARKET SIGNALING OF RELATIVE POSITION, OR BECKER MARRIED TO SPENCE
研究工人在有私人质量信息时通过信号向不同质量企业传递信息，分析刚性工资和弹性工资下均衡策略与效率，发现刚性工资下低能力工人教育投资可能过低且竞争加剧扭曲。
This paper considers a matching model of the labor market where workers, who have private information on their quality, signal to firms that also differ in quality. Signals allow assortative matching in which the highest-quality workers send the highest signals and are hired by the best firms. Matching is considered both when wages are rigid (nontransferable utility) and when they are fully flexible (transferable utility). In both cases, equilibrium strategies and payoffs depend on the distributions of worker and firm types. This is in contrast to separating equilibria of the standard model, which do not respond to changes in supply or demand. With sticky wages, despite incomplete information, equilibrium investment in education by low-ability workers can be inefficiently low, and this distortion can become worse in a more competitive environment. In contrast, with flexible wages, greater competition improves efficiency.