Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/60947 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
Staff Report No. 410
Publisher: 
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York, NY
Abstract: 
While widely accepted models of labor market search imply a constant reservation wage policy, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that reservation wages decline in the duration of search. This paper reports the results of the first real-time-search laboratory experiment. The controlled environment that subjects face is stationary, and the payoff-maximizing reservation wage is constant. Nevertheless, subjects' reservation wages decline sharply over time. We investigate two hypotheses to explain this decline: 1) searchers respond to the stock of accruing search costs, and 2) searchers experience nonstationary subjective costs of time spent searching. Our data support the latter hypothesis, and we substantiate this conclusion both experimentally and econometrically.
Subjects: 
Job search
consumer search
reservation wage
experiment
JEL: 
C91
J64
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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