How Making Crowdworkers’ Ratings Portable Across Platforms Can Increase Market Concentration

Description

Online labor platforms have been criticized for fueling precarious working conditions. Today’s reputation systems are platform-bound which locks workers in to the platform. One widely discussed approach to address this issue and improve workers’ position is the portability of reputational data. However, such a measure could have unintended side effects such as increased demand concentration to the benefit of workers with particularly high rating volume (“superstars”). In this study, we conduct an online experiment with 239 participants to test the effect of introducing reputation portability and study the demand effect of onsite and imported ratings. We find a positive effect of both onsite and imported ratings, where the effect of imported ratings corresponds to about 35% of onsite ratings. Moreover, the results imply the possibility for unintended cross-market demand concentration effects that particularly work in favor of superstar workers.

Period	09 Aug 2023
Event title	Academy of Management Annual Meeting
Event type	Conference
Location	United StatesShow on map