Games and Economic Behavior 64 (2008) 219–236 www.elsevier.com/locate/geb Job-market signaling and screening: An experimental comparison Dorothea Kübler a,b,∗, Wieland Müller c,d, Hans-Theo Normann e a Faculty of Economics and Management, Technical University Berlin, H 50, Straße des 17 Juni 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany b IZA, Germany c Department of Economics, Tilburg University, Postbus 90153, 5000LE Tilburg, The Netherlands d TILEC, The Netherlands e Department of Economics, Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20, OEX, UK Received 6 October 2005 Available online 16 January 2008 Abstract We analyze the Spence education game in experimental markets. We compare a signaling and a screening variant, and we analyze the effect of increasing the number of competing employers from two to three. In all treatments, efficient workers invest more often in education and employers pay higher wages to workers who have invested. However, separation of workers is incomplete and wages do not converge to equilibrium levels. In the signaling treatment, we observe significantly more separating outcomes compared to the screening treatment. Increasing the number of employers leads to higher wages in the signaling sessions but not in the screening sessions. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C72; C73; C91; D82 Keywords: Job-market signaling; Job-market screening; Sorting; Bayesian games; Experiments * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses:
[email protected] (D. Kübler),
[email protected] (W. Müller),
[email protected] (H.-T. Normann). 0899-8256/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geb.2007.10.010 220 D.