Human brands and mutual choices: an investigation of the marketing assistant professor job market

Abstract

We present a two-sided matching framework to investigate the entry-level marketing assistant professor job market. Under this framework, candidates’ and departments’ decisions to mutually choose one another are driven by the matching value produced by the pair, which is in turn determined by observable department brand cues and candidates’ human brand cues such as field of research, research productivity, and ranking status. Our results suggest that matches between candidates and faculty trained in the same field do not always generate the highest matching value. Candidates’ publications in top marketing journals enhance their likelihood of matching with research-oriented hiring departments, and this effect is moderated by their field of research. In general, the ranking status of candidates boosts their chance of being matched with research-oriented hiring departments. However, this effect differs across fields, and it also interacts with candidates’ own research productivity. In particular, publications by candidates from top-ranked degree-granting departments are taken as three to four times more valuable by research-oriented hiring departments. Our work extends the current research on the marketing job market and, most importantly, quantifies and compares the significance of various human brand cues in influencing mutual choices in the job market.