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A comment on Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much ... by p4wnc6 on Friday March 18, 2016 @06:21PM (#11315676)
The candidate could put their minimum acceptable salary in an envelope. The employer could put their maximum acceptable salary in an envelope. The two parties could agree with a third party arbiter that if the maximum from the employer is larger than the minimum from the candidate, the salary will be set to the midpoint between the two numbers, and otherwise, no deal can be reached so both walk away.

That's one way, at least, where neither party has to concede the information advantage.

In fact, I'm surprised there aren't already 37 start-ups that offer this as a service. You could have a cute little envelope logo like the MS Outlook logo and give a TED talk about how you're totally disrupting information asymmetry in recruiting, and eventually be pressured by techtopus to provide data about what candidates are asking for to perpetuate information asymmetry.

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Re:Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much ... by kybernetikos on Friday March 18, 2016 @08:11PM (#11316381)
You don't need the trusted third party. You could share the hash of the numbers so they couldn't be changed during the process, then do the millionaires problem [1] to find out which number was bigger, and finally and only if the right one is bigger, share the figures (setting the salary at the midpoint is the same as sharing the figures in terms of information transfer) and calculate it that way. The only way to not reveal the offers after a successful round would be to introduce some randomness, maybe choose a number at random from some agreed portion of the range between the numbers. I don't know if there is a zero knowledge protocol for selecting a number at random from a range where the extremes are set by two different people.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_Proble...

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Re:Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much ... by p4wnc6 on Friday March 18, 2016 @08:14PM (#11316404)
That sounds an awful lot like a cryptographic protocol to me. And CNN told me that cryptography helps terrorists. ... You're a witch!
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Re:Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much ... by Tobani on Friday March 18, 2016 @09:36PM (#11316741)
Very small rocks
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Re:Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much ... by j_mcnally on Friday March 18, 2016 @07:46PM (#11316232)
TInder for salaries.
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Re:Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much ... by nicholas73 on Saturday March 19, 2016 @03:00AM (#11317634)
Most companies want to ask the candidate, as most will give a number, and give the company the advantage.

Why pay for a service when you can just ask? Basically they do it on purpose because they have the upper hand.

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