Identifying Labor Market Competitors with Machine Learning Based on Maimai Platform

ABSTRACT

The demand for skilled labor has increased dramatically in the current knowledge-based economy, which is characterized by the growing intensity in labor market competition between firms. Therefore, it would be of special interest to identify future labor market competitors. At present, with the vast amount of textual data, the existing study focuses on constructing the human capital overlap and product overlap metrics with the text data as predictors to predict the labor market competition in the United States. Based on these metrics, this paper experiments with machine learning methods to predict Chinese labor market competition with Chinese text data. Furthermore, sentiment analysis is becoming popular and it has been used in a wide variety of fields. However, due to lack of data, there are few existing studies using sentiment analysis approach of firms’ online reviews. In response to this research gap, this paper constructs the sentiment analysis metric by mining the emotional content expressed in the firms’ online reviews on Maimai’s platform. The results show that our proposed metrics have superior predictive power over conventional measures and highlight the predictive utility of proposed sentiment analysis metric. Moreover, the nuanced two-dimensional competition analysis gives some interesting results.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We apply the LDA algorithm to detect latent business topics from textual business scopes and main businesses of firms that are available from the CSMAR Database, and we provide the business scope and main business of ZTE Corporation in Appendix B as an example.

2. We apply the LDA algorithm to detect latent business topics from textual business scopes and main businesses of firms that are available from the CSMAR Database, and we provide the business scope and main business of ZTE Corporation in Appendix B as an example.

3. Figure C3 in Appendix C plots a subgraph of the HCF network among the five firms across different industries in 2019.