Title: Online Labor Markets: Reputation Transferability, Career Development Paths and Hiring Decisions

Speaker: Prof. Marios Kokkodis

Date: Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Time: 1:30 to 3:30 PM

Location: 10th Floor Conference Room, 177 Huntington Ave.

Abstract: In an online labor marketplace (OLM) employers post jobs, receive worker applications, and make hiring decisions. Because of the natural heterogeneity that appears in task categories, skills, and the latent abilities of workers and employers, these markets suffer from a series of inefficiencies. This research focuses on understanding these inefficiencies and proposing solutions. In particular, we study three problems: (1) How do employers make hiring decisions? (2) How should workers expand their skillset? (3) How does past experience transfer to new tasks? For each one of these problems we propose, build and evaluate solutions on a unique dataset of more than 3.5 million job applications (hundreds of thousands of completed tasks) from a major OLM. Our work facilitates (1) employers to make better-informed and faster hiring decisions, (2) workers to build up their demand and (3) the marketplace to increase its transaction volume.

Readings:

  • Marios Kokkodis, Panagiotis Papadimitriou, Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis: Hiring Behavior Models for Online Labor Markets . In WSDM, 2015.
  • Marios Kokkodis, Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis: Reputation Transferability in Online Publications Labor Markets. Management Science, 2015.
  • Marios Kokkodis, Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis: Career Development Paths in Online Labor Markets, Working paper, 2016.

    • Short bio: Marios Kokkodis is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management, Boston College. He received his PhD in Information Systems from NYU Stern in May 2015, under the guidance of Panos Ipeirotis. His research focuses on interdisciplinary data-driven problems (online markets, data mining, econometrics, social science). His teaching includes data-analytics and data mining courses for both undergraduate and graduate business majors. His research appears in major Information Systems (Management Science, ICIS) and Computer Science (WSDM, WWW) outlets. He has received multiple awards including the NYU Stern Harold W. MacDowell Award for his dissertation in online labor markets.