Inefficiencies in the labor market such as friction in matching members to jobs and the existence of skill gaps in various sectors of the economy are considered to be major problems facing economies today. The central premise of our work is that increasing the productivity of a member of the workforce (and thereby of the economy as a whole) crucially depends on identifying and recommending skills whose acquisition will yield the highest utility gains for that member. To this end, we develop novel unsupervised Bayesian multi-view models BayesMatch and NpBayesMatch which can match members to other similar members as well as relevant jobs using shared features. The matching step is followed by a skill recommendation step SkillR which makes demand-based skill recommendations to members. Our extensive quantitative evaluation using a rich dataset comprised of member profiles and job postings from LinkedIn suggests that skill recommendations made by our algorithm are highly correlated with skills demanded in heldout future jobs compared to those made by traditional collaborative filtering algorithms that do not utilize information about skill demand. This indicates that either members of the workforce do not have skills demanded by jobs or do not have enough information about which are the best skills to signal for competing in the labor market.

Security defects in software cost millions of dollars to firms in terms of downtime, disruptions, and confidentiality breaches. However, the economic implications of these defects for software vendors are not well understood. Lack of legal liability and the presence of switching costs and network externalities may protect software vendors from incurring significant costs in the event of a vulnerability announcement, unlike such industries as auto and pharmaceuticals, which have been known to suffer significant loss in market value in the event of a defect announcement. Although research in software economics has studied firms' incentives to improve overall quality, there have not been any studies which show that software vendors have an incentive to invest in building more secure software. The objectives of this paper are twofold. 1) We examine how a software vendor's market value changes when a vulnerability is announced. 2) We examine how firm and vulnerability characteristics mediate the change in the market value of a vendor. We collect data from leading national newspapers and industry sources, such as the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), by searching for reports on published software vulnerabilities. We show that vulnerability announcements lead to a negative and significant change in a software vendor's market value. In our sample, on average, a vendor loses around 0.6 percent value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. We find that a software vendor loses more market share if the market is competitive or if the vendor is small. To provide further insight, we use the information content of the disclosure announcement to classify vulnerabilities into various types. We find that the change in stock price is more negative if the vendor fails to provide a patch at the time of disclosure. Also, more severe flaws have a significantly greater impact. Our analysis provides many interesting implications for software vendors as well as policy makers.

Balancing the needs of information distributors and their audiences has grown harder in the age of the Internet. While the demand for attention continues to increase rapidly with the volume of information and communication, the supply of human attention is relatively fixed. Markets are a social institution for efficiently balancing supply and demand of scarce resources. Charging a price for sending messages may help discipline senders from demanding more attention than they are willing to pay for. Price may also help recipients estimate the value of a message before reading it. We report the results of two laboratory experiments to explore the consequences of a pricing system for electronic mail. Charging postage for email causes senders to be more selective and send fewer messages. However, recipients did not use the postage paid by senders as a signal of importance. These studies suggest markets for attention have potential, but their design needs more work.