Cheap Talk on Freelance Platforms
研究了自由职业平台上买家通过空谈报告质量偏好如何影响自由职业者的申请和定价策略，发现不允许事后议价时买家会真实报告，而允许议价且买家议价能力高时低类型买家可能夸大偏好并事后讨价还价。
We consider a large decentralized freelance platform where buyers with private information about their quality preferences are matched with freelancers that differ in quality. When posting their job requests, buyers can report their quality preferences via cheap talk, which influences freelancers’ application and pricing strategies. By exaggerating one’s quality preference, a buyer attracts not only more applications from freelancers, but also those with higher quality, at the cost of a higher expected price. We find that it is always an equilibrium for the buyers to report their quality preferences truthfully when they cannot renegotiate with freelancers on their asking prices after getting matched. On the other hand, when postmatch renegotiation is allowed and buyers have relatively high bargaining power, low-type buyers may strategically exaggerate their quality preferences, and subsequently after getting matched, costly signal their true type and bargain for lower prices. From a platform design perspective, our analysis implies that the option of renegotiation, designed to facilitate postmatch information transmission, may backfire by giving rise to buyers’ prematch opportunistic behaviors of information distortion. This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.