A truly informed diner would choose a restaurant based on the quality of the menu and the chef's experience. The discerning investor would decide which company to back after studying the business plan and meeting the founders. In reality, people often copy the choices of others. Diners pick the crowded restaurant over the empty one. Investors go with the company that already has multiple backers. Such bandwagon effects are not necessarily irrational. Often, the buyer knows less about a product than the seller: the collective wisdom of the crowd can correct for such " asymmetric information ". Scholars are now asking whether herd behavior also prevails in labor markets. To find out, Kory Kroft of the University of Toronto devised an experiment in which they applied for 3,000 clerical, administrative, sales and customer-service jobs advertised online by submitting 12, 000 fictitious CVs. The submissions were designed so that applicants with similar backgrounds, education and experience went for the same job. The only difference was how long the applicant had been jobless, a period that ranged from no time at all to as much as 36 months. They found that the odds of an applicant being called back by an employer declined steadily as the duration of unemployment rose, from 7.4% after one month without work down to 4%-5% at the eight-month mark, where the call-back rate stabilized. These results, the authors say, cannot be because employers found some qualitative flaw in the longer-term unemployed that was hidden from outsiders, since the applicants were similar in other respects. Another explanation for long-term unemployment—that people make less effort to find work as their time out of the labor force lengthens—is also not applicable here. A third possibility is that employers equate lengthening unemployment with atrophying skills and thus falling productivity. But this should be true whether the economy is booming or in recession. The decline in call-back rates was much more pronounced in cities with tight labour markets: call-back rates changed relatively little when higher unemployment prevailed locally. From this, the authors infer that employers are more likely to overlook a long period of unemployment if overall economic conditions are stacked against candidates. These results strongly suggest that long-term unemployment is at least partly self-fulfilling. Like patrons who avoid restaurants purely because they are empty, employers were reluctant to hire someone other employers didn' t want.

单选题 By saying "asymmetric information"(Para. 1), what does the author mean?

单选题 Kory Kroft of the University of Toronto devised an experiment to_____.

单选题 One reasonable explanation for the research results may be______.

单选题 The research results convey the message that_____.

单选题 Generally speaking, the author's attitude towards bandwagon behavior is______.