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

我们研究代理人的动机，以在将其用于生产性用途之前发现她的才能所在。在我们的设置中，代理可以反复专门化和学习同一类型的人才，或者试验和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布是有效的，但劳动力市场制度在个人实验激励方面发挥着至关重要的作用。给予代理人足够大的议价能力的机构，为实验提供了激励，但对于议价能力弱的机构，代理人专业化。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）