Should hiring schools coordinate on delaying their interviews?

The AEA emails me this (web version here):

The AEA suggests that employers wait to extend interview invitations until Monday, December 7, 2020 or later.

Rationale: the AEA will deliver signals from job candidates to employers on December 2. We suggest that employers wait and review those signals and incorporate them into their decision-making, before extending interview invitations.

…The AEA suggests that employers conduct initial interviews starting on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, and that all interviews take place virtually; i.e. either by phone or online (e.g. by Zoom). We also ask that all employers indicate on EconTrack when they have extended interview invitations (https://www.aeaweb.org/econtrack).

Rationale: In the past, interviews were conducted at the AEA/ASSA meetings. This promoted thickness of the market, because most candidates and employers were present at the in-person meetings, but had the disadvantage of precluding both job candidates and interviewers from fully participating in AEA/ASSA sessions. Since the 2021 AEA/ASSA meetings (which will take place Jan 3-5, 2021) will be entirely virtual, we suggest that interviews NOT take place during the AEA/ASSA meetings to allow job candidates and interviewers to participate in the conference.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they don’t offer much economic analysis of this recommendation.  I have a few remarks, none of which are beyond the analytical acumen of the AEA itself:

1. This proposal could well be a tax on the more conscientious departments, which will abide by the stricture while the more rogue departments jump the gun, giving them a relative advantage in finding job candidates.

2. It is common practice for the very top departments to make phone calls to advisors early, well before Christmas, and in essence tie up their future hires before the rest of the market clears (even if the ink on the contract is not dry until later on).  Whatever you might think of this practice, have any of those departments vowed to stop doing this?  If not, is the new recommendation simply an exhortation that other departments ought not to copy them, thus giving them exclusive use of this practice?  And did the AEA — which essentially is run by people from those top schools — ever complain about this practice?

3. In the more liquid market, as this proposal is designed to create, the better job candidates are likely to end up going to the more highly rated schools.  That is the opposite of how the NBA draft works — this year the Minnesota Timberwolves (a very bad team) pick first.  So maybe the more liquid market is best for the most highly rated schools — is that obviously a good thing?

4. Many job candidates don’t get any early offers at all, and this is likely to be all the more true with Covid-19 and tight state budgets.  Aren’t they better off if the market clears sooner rather than later?  Then they can either move on to other jobs searches, take jobs with community colleges, look for postdocs, or whatever.  Why postpone those adjustments?  Is their welfare being counted in this analysis?  Aren’t some of them the very neediest and also most stressed people in the economics job market?

5. Let’s say instead the market is done sequentially, where first you “auction off” the candidates in highest demand, ensuring that say a department rated #17 does not tie up an offer (fruitlessly, at that) to one of the very top candidates.  Won’t that #17 school then bid harder for the candidates one tier lower, thus making that part of the market more liquid?  I know it doesn’t have to work out that way, but surely that is one plausible scenario?

6. In finance, there are some results that you get less “racing” behavior with batched rather than continuous trading auctions. Again, that doesn’t have to be true, but surely it is no accident that many high-frequency traders oppose the idea of periodic rather than continuous securities auctions?  What exactly are the relevant conditions here?

7. Would many economists recommend that say the top tech firms not make any offers before a certain date, so as to keep that labor market “more liquid”?  What exactly is the difference here?

8. Might it be possible that a permanent shift to non-coordinated interview dates, and less temporally coordinated Zoom interviews and fly-outs, would permanently lower the status and import of said AEA?

I do not wish to pretend those are the only relevant factors.  But here is a simple question: does anyone connected with the AEA have the stones to actually write a cogent economic or game-theoretic analysis of this proposal?  Or does the AEA not do economics any more?