Matching Markets in the Ballet Industry
Source: https://www.dancemagazine.com/ballet-job-market/
In this article, Olivia Hartzell likens the process of finding a job in the ballet world to a matching market in that both the dancers and the companies are sizing each other up — to be hired, the dancer and the company must mutually choose each other. However, the hiring system in ballet is very inefficient because there’s no standard for the hiring timeline, as dancers and companies respectively are looking for work/holding auctions on a rolling basis. Thus, a dancer might accept a job offer from a company they value less rather than hold out for a company that holds auditions later in the season but that they value more. Furthermore, there are cases where offers are rescinded late into the season, which hurts both the dancer and the other companies that might have hired them.
Hartzell proposes a market redesign as a solution. One proposal is having an industry-wide uniform hiring process. To do this, increasing market “thickness” is required, where the largest possible pool of dancers and companies are brought together at once. Hartzell brings up that this is a facet used in many matching market situations, such as PhD offers, where applicants don’t have to accept offers until after a specified date. She also discusses clearinghouses as another idea (reminding me of the residency match process), where after all the auditions are held, dancers and companies both submit their rankings, and an algorithm will determine the final matching.
This article applies what we have learned about matching markets in lecture to the ballet job market. I think in this scenario, the dancers and the companies are both buyers as well as sellers. The companies (buyers) are willing to compensate the dancers (sellers) for their work and likewise, the dancers (buyers) are willing to exchange their work for the opportunities that the companies (sellers) can give them. In class, we discussed a preferred seller graph to be a graph where each buyer gets their favorite counterpart — the dancers get the company they want and the companies get the dancers they want. In the current system, however, creating a preferred seller graph and maximizing social welfare are difficult because of how unstructured the hiring process is. Thus, the ideas Hartzell suggests would create a regimented timeline for auditions/giving out offers and maximize social welfare. Furthermore, as Hartzell states, the process would encourage truthful bidding as a dominant strategy to ensure each dancer and each company are getting the best possible matches. I also wanted to point out Hartzell explicitly calls out that companies don’t compete on price, and dancers are more often times more concerned about finding a company that suits their artistic goals. This shows that value doesn’t always have to be in the form of prices but can encompass a lot of more intrinsic factors that can’t be tangibly measured.
I found a lot of problems in the ballet hiring process similar to those of the college internship application process. Because companies release their applications at such staggered times, it’s hard for every student and every company to end up with choices they’re happy with. Companies often compete with each other to see who can release applications the fastest to snatch up the best applicants, and students can find themselves hastily accepting an offer with a fast deadline, forgoing opportunities they might value more down the line. Though it would be difficult since every industry operates on a different deadline, it would be interesting to explore how a more standardized process that potentially uses a clearinghouse approach might make the experience less stressful for both companies and students.