Should you negotiate?
While many of us in this class aren’t quite ready to begin entering the workforce as graduates, salary negotiation is still a very important topic for us. Whether it be for internships, part time job or anything of the sort, recent studies show that typical college graduates don’t even consider salary negotiation.
A study run by the Atlantic shows that in terms of entry-level candidates, only 50% of men and 33% of women were negotiated their salary. This study also showed that only about 35% of women in engineering negotiated their salary. Another study run by NerdWallet showed that 62 percent of recent grads didn’t negotiate while 84% of employers were willing to negotiate.
Steve Hanov, in his blog, writes about the game theory behind salary negotiations. He starts by comparing two individuals with the same jobs but different starting salaries and shows the incredibly large difference in pay over time for the two of them. Hanov creates a Nash’s equilibrium for negotiations showing that if an employer asks you to name a price you are in a worse situation than if an employers names their price.