The Research Of University Students' Job-hunting Behavior Based On Behavioral Economics

Today with the popularization of higher education, the difficulty in employment of graduates has become more and more serious, which aroused more and more concern and attention to solve it. This paper uses the perspective of behavioral economics to explore the whole process of job hunting behavior of graduates in China. We aimed to investigate the behavior of graduates during the job hunting process, to find the psychological factors which influence graduating students in China during the job hunting process, so as to provide some suggestions on how to treat the problem of graduate employment for stakeholders.This article will divide the process of job-hunting into the preparation stage before job hunting and stage of breaking contract or not after employed. Using the basic model of behavioral economics, we analyze these two stage of job hunting respectively.1. In the stage of preparation before job hunting we use the self-control theory to analyze the sophisticate, naive procrastinators and partly naive procrastinators, finally we found that, for hunting job, as long as there is a little bit of naive it will be likely to cause serious delays, unfortunately, the sophisticate are difficult to avoid serious delays, not even to say naive procrastinators and partly naive procrastinators. Furthermore, we use the herd effect to analyze the Chinese university graduates behavior of following the trend during the job-hunting process.2. In the stage of breach of contract or not after employed we use the prospect theory, the typical theory of behavioral economics, to analyze and research. The result shows that graduating students decide to tear up the contract or not is not simply depend on the good or bad of the job he/she got but also based on the first contracted job and the reference point of other classmates. Meanwhile, we also use endowment effect theory to interpret and analyze the behavior of breach contract in graduate students.Finally, according to the above analysis we offer the suggestions to the stakeholders.