Pride and prejudice on a centralized academic labor market

Abstract

The Academic Labor Market in France can be viewed as a constrained Stable Marriage problem, pairing universities and candidates according to their (elitist) preferences. A Multi-Agent based model, calibrated after the empirical evidence, is used to investigate how universities can recruit the best candidates with high confidence. Extensive simulations suggest that universities can be divided in four categories: top and medium universities have no difficulty in attracting the candidates they have selected, contrarily to good and bad universities. In this paper, a learning mechanism is presented: universities are allowed to tune their expectations depending on whether they did succeed to attract candidates in the previous recruitment rounds. The impact of over/under estimations is analyzed with respect to the hiring efficiency and quality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.