Title: Job satisfaction as a unified mechanism for agent behaviour in a labour market with referral hiring

Authors: Alexander Tarvid

Addresses: Faculty of Economics and Management, University of Latvia, 5 Aspazijas blvd., Riga LV-1050, Latvia

Abstract: This paper proposes to use job satisfaction (JS) as a unified mechanism for guiding agents' behaviour in the labour market. In the labour-market model presented here, JS affects agents' decisions on which vacancies to apply for, which of them to select in case of receiving several acknowledgements from firms and whether to quit the current job. The performance of the model depending on the structure of JS is studied. The model where JS depends on monetary (relative wages), social (relative number of friends), content and career components is compared with models where JS has only the first or the first two of these. It creates a more realistic firm size distribution and smaller duration of unemployment and on-the-job search. Average JS increases but median wages decrease with firm size for both manual and non-manual jobs. All models generate the Beveridge curve and log-normal distribution of wages.

Keywords: agent-based modelling; job satisfaction; labour market; social networks; agent behaviour; referral hiring; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; MAS; firm size; unemployment duration; on-the-job search; median wages.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEE.2016.077241

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics, 2016 Vol.6 No.3, pp.213 - 238

Received: 06 Nov 2014
Accepted: 13 May 2015
Published online: 25 Jun 2016 *

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