Experimental Analysis of e-Employment Market Designs

Abstract

The majority of electronic (e) commerce research addresses markets and processes associated with the sale of products and services. However, in comparison with research addressing product and service markets, an important area of e-commerce has been relatively neglected: employment markets. In this article, we integrate the key economic and technological elements required to design robust electronic employment markets, and we present empirical results from a pilot experiment comparing performance for a human-based job assignment process to alternative market designs and technologies. In particular, we examined the performance of people equipped with varying levels of technological support ranging from no support through use of a decision support system to total automation of the tasks. The results provide insight into the relative capabilities of people and machines in this domain, and they provide guidance for electronic-employment market design.