Information Frictions and Employee Sorting between Start-ups

Would workers apply to better firms if they were more informed about firm quality?

Would workers apply to better firms if they were more informed about firm quality? Collaborating with 26 science-based start-ups, we create a custom job board and invite business school alumni to apply. The job board randomizes across applicants to show coarse expert ratings of all start-ups' science and/or business model quality. Making ratings visible strongly reallocates applications toward higher-rated firms. This reallocation holds, restricting to high-quality workers. Treatments operate in part by shifting worker beliefs about firms' right-tail outcomes. Despite these benefits, workers make posttreatment bets indicating highly overoptimistic beliefs about start-up success, suggesting a problem of broader informational deficits. (JEL D22, D83, J22, J23, J24, M13, M51)