Intervention(s)
In online labor marketplaces (e.g., Freelancer.com and Upwork.com), after an employee (i.e., buyer) post a job, workers (i.e., service providers or pitchers) who are interested in the job will bid by specifying the amount and time they need to complete the job. These workers normally send sale pitches (texts) to this employee.
The purpose of this research is to explore how certainty words and rapport-building words in worker's job-seeking pitches affect employer's hiring decisions.
I test the following 2 hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: The relationship between online service-pitchers' words of certainty and their attractiveness to buyers is in the form of an inverted U-shaped curve, such that online service-pitchers' likelihood of being selected over competing sellers by buyers is greatest when their pitch-certainty is moderate rather than when it is low or high—hereafter referred to as the "TMGT-effect of pitch-certainty."
Hypothesis 2: The TMGT-effect of pitch-certainty is stronger for online service-pitchers whose pitches contain a lower (rather than higher)proportion of rapport-building words.
I have access to secondary dataset from one of largest online labor platform in the US. The initial results support our hypotheses. I will use an experiment to verify my findings.
This pre-registered experiment has a 3 (certainty words levels: High, medium, and low) by 2 (rapport-building words: Absent VS. present) by 2 (geographical (dis)similarity: Same VS Different) between-subject design.
a. Definitions
• Certainty words are words that show assertiveness of language used by authors, words such as always, absolutely, and assure (Fast & Funder, 2008). Certainty words variable are qualified into three levels based on the percentage of certainty words in the pitches. Since this experiment is used to verify findings obtained using archival data, we use percentile values of certainty words in our archival data as base to define certainty levels. Specifically, we define pitches with no less than 6 percent of certainty words (value of 75 percentile of certainty words percentage in our archival data) as high certainty, pitches with certainty words percentage values between no less than 1 percent (value of 26 percentile of certainty words percentage in our archival data) and 6 percent (value of 74 percentile of certainty words percentage in our archival data) as medium certainty, and pitches with at most 1 percent of certainty words (value of 25 percentile of certainty words percentage in our archival data) as low certainty.
• Rapport-building words are words that build bond between communicators (Gremler & Gwinner, 2008). Rapport-building words include four dimensions: 1. Greeting words (e.g., “hello” and “how are you”). 2. Mentioning communication recipient's names. 3. Politeness words (e.g., “thanks” and “regards”). And 4. Worker’s positive emotion about himself (e.g., “excellent” and “successful”). We define high and low rapport building using the similar approach to quantify certainty levels. Specifically, we define pitches with at least 6 percent of rapport-building word (value of 75 percentile of rapport-building words percentage in archival data) as high rapport-building and at most 2 percent of rapport-building words (value of 25 percentile of rapport-building words percent in archival data) as low rapport-building
• Geographical (dis) similarity measure whether employers and job-seeking workers are from the same geographical regions (Lin, Liu, & Viswanathan, 2018).
Thus, the treatments are the different levels of certainty words, different levels of rapport-building words, and whether employer and job-seeking workers come from same regions.
References
Fast, L. A., & Funder, D. C. (2008). Personality as manifest in word use: correlations with self-report, acquaintance report, and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2), 334.
Gremler, D. D., Gwinner, K. P. (2008). Rapport-building behaviors used by retail employees. Journal of Retailing, 84(3), 308-324
Lin, M., Liu, Y., & Viswanathan, S. (2018). Effectiveness of reputation in contracting for customized production: Evidence from online labor markets. Management Science, 64(1), 345-359.