SELEZIONE DEL PERSONALE E ASIMMETRIA INFORMATIVA

According to Baron and Kreps (2012, p.315), “because employment is simultaneously an economic and a social relationship, one cannot profitably study it as one or the other in isolation”. In line with this idea, the aim of this thesis is to raise awareness among I/O psychologists about the explanatory and predictive potential of signaling theory (Spence, 1974) for a more comprehensive study of phenomena related to personnel selection. Therefore, through the integration of insights from psychology, the objective of our work is to formulate a dynamic signaling model as an extension of Spence’s (1974) model. In his model, Spence (1974) describes how, in situations of asymmetric information, two parties with partially conflicting interests (and thus with the risk of misrepresentations) can nevertheless exchange accurate information. In particular, Spence (1974) demonstrates how, through the acquisition of costly signals, such as education, job candidates can communicate their productive capacity to potential employers, thereby distinguishing themselves from less productive candidates and thus receiving higher wages. Given the offered wage as a function of the education level, it is assumed that candidates maximize their return net of signaling costs. Therefore, the prerequisite for education to be an effective signal is that signaling costs are negatively correlated with the individual’s productive capacity, i.e., it must be easier for the more able candidates to acquire a given level of education compared to the less able ones. Spence’s (1974) model has intrinsic dynamics: when candidates are hired and their actual productivity is discovered ex post, the employer may update her beliefs regarding the relation between productivity and education; as a result, the offered wage plan may be adjusted for the nexthiring round. The offered wage plan represents the employer’s prediction of productivity. When the prediction is correct, then the system is in equilibrium, and the employer does not update her beliefs. In other words, it turns out that the hired individuals are paid exactly the value of their productivity. Spence (1974) proposes a dynamic model in which he demonstrates that as a consequence of a perturbation, represented by a parameter denoted as B, the system does not reach an equilibrium: candidates are cyclically underpaid or overpaid. To the best of our knowledge, Spence (1974) does not provide any interpretation for that parameter. The contextualization of signaling costs has allowed us to interpret the parameter B as the signaling value of education. Exogenous perturbations that change the level of ability required to perform a job or to cope with a course of study are reflected in variations in the actual value of B, which therefore may not coincide with what is expected by the employer. The result of such misalignment is a state of disequilibrium that leads the employer to update her expectations, resulting in an increase or decrease in individuals’ investment in education. Adopting a bounded rationality perspective, we formalized the signaling system as an adaptive system using a gradient descent method with a reactivity parameter to model the employer’s decision-making process. This method more faithfully replicates the unsystematic procedure characterized by intuition and “trial and error" used in organizational realities to assess educational credentials. A remarkable result of our model is demonstrating that the repeated boundedly rational decisions can lead to an adaptive process that converges to a rational equilibrium. Other results, limitations, and possible psychological implications will be discussed in the end.