5 ms·

So if a company wants to attract top talent they can just publicy offer +10% and they get the best people. Seems to me it could become a race to the top, heavil

So if a company wants to attract top talent they can just publicy offer +10% and they get the best people. Seems to me it could become a race to the top, heavily benefiting employees.

ghaff 4y ago
Now you're in game theory territory. A bunch of competitive companies can (don't say collude) mirror each other's salary ranges and maybe they're OK with not using higher salaries to hire away talent which may or not actually be worth more money anyway. Of course, this happens to some degree anyway as companies research this sort of information.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Hmm, this could only work if the entire industry is either stagnant or heavily regulated. You need only a few companies that don't go along to completely disrupt that plan.
- nequo 4y ago
  In game theory territory, no company's best response is to stick to publicly posted salary ranges. Suppose that you are among the top performing workers in the labor market. If you have two job offers, you could get those two companies to match each other's offers. Each of the two company's best response is to match the other's offer to the point at which their offer is exactly equal to the value that you would bring to them. At that point, your net value to them is exactly zero, and beyond that, your net value is negative. So the highest salary that you can get is the value that you would produce for the company where you would be the second most productive. If either company tries to stick to the publicly posted salary ranges even though you would bring them more value than that, then they are forgoing profits and not following their equilibrium best response.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And yet collusion has happened in Big Tech.
    - nequo 4y ago
      It did. That was a cooperative equilibrium in which they could share their gains from offering you a lower salary. In a non-cooperative equilibrium, they cannot share their gains so their best response is to match competing offers.
    - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
      Yeah, and it was blown up when Facebook refused to play ball. They wanted to hire more engineers. They paid more and didn’t restrict where they recruited.
- ilyt 4y ago
  They did that anyway without that via various no poaching agreements, this makes it easier to notice, not harder. ... are you one hiring people ?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    No. Companies already do research into what other companies pay. As another poster noted, if there is a non-competitive equilibrium (mostly among a certain class of competitors), there can be a tacit agreement that we just do whatever Google does. No formal agreements needed. Of course, companies already have better information than public websites do so they can mostly already do this without narrow salary bands being published.

So if a company wants to attract top talent they can just publicy offer +10% and they get the best people. Seems to me it could become a race to the top, heavily benefiting employees.

ghaff 4y ago

Now you're in game theory territory. A bunch of competitive companies can (don't say collude) mirror each other's salary ranges and maybe they're OK with not using higher salaries to hire away talent which may or not actually be worth more money anyway. Of course, this happens to some degree anyway as companies research this sort of information.

Aeolun 4y ago
Hmm, this could only work if the entire industry is either stagnant or heavily regulated. You need only a few companies that don't go along to completely disrupt that plan.
nequo 4y ago
In game theory territory, no company's best response is to stick to publicly posted salary ranges. Suppose that you are among the top performing workers in the labor market. If you have two job offers, you could get those two companies to match each other's offers. Each of the two company's best response is to match the other's offer to the point at which their offer is exactly equal to the value that you would bring to them. At that point, your net value to them is exactly zero, and beyond that, your net value is negative. So the highest salary that you can get is the value that you would produce for the company where you would be the second most productive. If either company tries to stick to the publicly posted salary ranges even though you would bring them more value than that, then they are forgoing profits and not following their equilibrium best response.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And yet collusion has happened in Big Tech.
  - nequo 4y ago
    It did. That was a cooperative equilibrium in which they could share their gains from offering you a lower salary. In a non-cooperative equilibrium, they cannot share their gains so their best response is to match competing offers.
  - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    Yeah, and it was blown up when Facebook refused to play ball. They wanted to hire more engineers. They paid more and didn’t restrict where they recruited.
ilyt 4y ago
They did that anyway without that via various no poaching agreements, this makes it easier to notice, not harder. ... are you one hiring people ?
- ghaff 4y ago
  No. Companies already do research into what other companies pay. As another poster noted, if there is a non-competitive equilibrium (mostly among a certain class of competitors), there can be a tacit agreement that we just do whatever Google does. No formal agreements needed. Of course, companies already have better information than public websites do so they can mostly already do this without narrow salary bands being published.