Abstract

We study an agent’s incentives to discover where her talents lie before putting them to productive use. In our setting, an agent can specialize and learn about the same type of talent repeatedly, or experiment and learn about different types of talent. While experimentation is efficient for a range of distributions of talent and initial signals, labor-market institutions play a crucial role for individual incentives to experiment. Institutions that give the agent sufficiently large bargaining power, provide incentives for experimentation, but for weak bargaining power, agents specialize. We also look at how competition in the labor market, human capital accumulation, and correlation across talents affect incentives to experiment. (JEL codes: D83; J24; J42)

中文翻译：

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发现人才的激励措施

摘要

我们研究代理人的动机，以在将其投入生产之前发现她的才能所在。在我们的设置，代理可以专注和反复学习相同类型的人才，或试验，了解不同类型的人才。虽然实验对于一系列人才和初始信号的分配是有效的，但劳动力市场制度在个人实验激励方面起着至关重要的作用。赋予代理人足够大议价能力的制度，为实验提供了激励，但对于弱议价能力，代理人专门化。我们还研究了劳动力市场的竞争、人力资本积累和人才之间的相关性如何影响实验的激励。（JEL代码：D83；J24；J42）