This paper introduces the Fairwork Foundation, a research initiative that is also developing an intervention around the quality of work on digital labour platforms. Lacking the ability to ...collectively bargain, many platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. As a result of this new, digitally-managed market for work, many workers have jobs characterised by long and irregular hours, low income, and high stress. Fairwork's field research across India and South Africa finds challenges for workers across a range of issues which form the basis for a set of decent work principles on: pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation. The results of the field research are being used to rank and compare platforms against these principles as a means to encourage decent, and discourage ‘un-decent’ platform work.
Many overtouristified cities introduced limitations to the diffusion of short-term rentals, and are struggling to guarantee their enforcement, while evidence about the impact of those regulations is ...limited. The article provides an overview of the instruments adopted by 16 European cities, and an assessment of their effectiveness. By comparing regulated and unregulated cities, we show that the former obtained a persistent reduction in the number of listings of entire apartments, in the ratio between entire apartments and shared rooms, and in the number of professional hosts, but no significant impact on the spatial concentration of short-term rentals in the city. We also provide evidence of the effects of the diverse regulatory strategies, and of the importance of obtaining the cooperation of booking platforms.
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•Cities' regulations produce a persistent reduction in the pressure of short-term rentals.•Regulations are also effective in curbing the professionalization of the market.•The effects on the decongestion of the most touristified neighbourhoods are minimal.•The cooperation of booking platforms is crucial to the enforcement of regulations.•Adopting the ‘right’ policy-mix is less relevant than a sufficient degree of stringency.
The paper examines the size, structure, distribution, dynamics, and use of Airbnb accommodation offer in 167 countries. Web-scrapping Airbnb website in fall 2018 and 2019 resulted in a datasets on ...5.7 million listings, including 3.6 million active listings which have been rented out (reviewed) during the last year. Listings are divided into four groups based on types of properties and numbers of offers hosted by one platform user. The results show that the platform is most commonly used to rent out entire apartments by multi-hosts. The numbers of Airbnb listings in countries depend on the level of economic development and size of inbound tourism. One third of Airbnb supply is located in big cities, another one third near seacoasts. Airbnb offer grows most quickly in its relatively new markets, while in primary urban destinations of some European countries it is stable or decreases. The offer of professional hosts is growing more quickly than of peer-to-peer hosts. Differences in the frequency of use and prices of listings exaggerate the geographical unevenness in benefits and impacts of Airbnb activity. Airbnb supply is not a uniform segment of tourist accommodation and its effects on destinations should be considered in relation to territorial context.
This study focuses on sports live streaming platforms (SLSPs) that allow sports viewers to actively engage with various actors while watching sports live streams. By considering the influence of ...multiple actors, the study explores how different types of viewers perceive the value of their viewing experience. A structural model is developed and tested among four viewer groups who utilise SLSPs for sports event consumption. The findings demonstrate that the value propositions of all four actors significantly contribute to viewers’ experiences, and each group of viewers can acquire unique perceived value from the viewing experience. The research highlights the substantial impact of viewer engagement behaviour on the value co-creation process. It emphasises the importance for SLSPs’ operations managers to recognise the value propositions of diverse actors and the engagement behaviour of viewers, as this is crucial for tailoring viewing experiences and providing personalised services.
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•Operational effectiveness parameters differentially affect platform’s driver availability.•Platform enhances driver availability by jointly accounting for referrals and ...churn.•Goal-oriented feedback tied to compensation can nurture operational effectiveness.•Service quality, service failure, and monetary value form effectiveness parameters.
Ridesharing platforms test incentive schemes with variable commissions where drivers are compensated proportionate to their inputs. The operational effectiveness implications of these incentives, however, remain largely unexplored. We test the differential effects of operational effectiveness parameters of drivers’ service quality, service failure, and monetary value on drivers’ referral and churn behaviors. At a process level, we demonstrate the beneficial effects of goal-oriented (versus informational) feedback on drivers’ monetary value and service performance outcomes. Further, we investigate the moderating role of drivers’ organizational justice perceptions on these relationships. Using exogenous data from a cluster-randomized field experiment with 1,698 ridesharing drivers across 8 cities, we show that goal-oriented feedback improves operational effectiveness parameters. Additionally, these parameters improve the platform’s resource availability with drivers’ higher referrals and lower churn. Comprehensively, platforms can derive benefits in operational effectiveness and resource availability by priming drivers using goal-oriented feedback in tandem with a variable commission.
This study delves into the gendered labor regime of platform game work in China, a burgeoning remote platform economy connecting customers with workers for entertainment or gameplay assistance. It ...reveals that offline gender divisions persistently seep into and solidify the logic of gender discipline in online gaming, channeling women into service-centric roles that face devaluation. Beyond the overt obstacles hindering women from lucrative gaming tasks, their marginalized position is intertwined with diminished gaming capital in team-based competitive gameplay, a factor frequently misinterpreted as “gaming skill.” Even ostensibly neutral policy moves have pronounced gendered implications, as gaming platforms, wary of governmental repercussions, strategically diminish the prominence of feminine-presenting workers. By elucidating the multifaceted ways women are culturally, socially, and algorithmically marginalized within the gaming service supply chain, this study enriches the growing body of literature on the intersectionality within the platform workforce.
•The implications of multi-sided platforms (MSPs) in managing digital business ecosystems were examined.•Special focus on the MSP utilization as a marketplace in the Finnish manufacturing ...ecosystem.•Benefits of an MSP for the ecosystem members and the entire ecosystem were presented.•New business opportunities opened in an MSP were showed.•Also challenges related to the utilization of an MSP in a DBE were presented.
Industrial organizations are increasingly engaging in multi-sided platforms (MSPs) to facilitate the formation of digital business ecosystems. These platforms enable networked business, where multiple partners interact to create value throughout the ecosystem. This study examines the implications of MSPs in managing digital business ecosystems by obtaining feedback from industry actors through a case study of MSP utilization as a marketplace in the Finnish manufacturing ecosystem. Interviews are conducted with various participants representing different companies and roles in the ecosystem. The results show the perceived benefits of an MSP for the ecosystem members and entire ecosystem, and new business opportunities unlocked by an MSP. Finally, MSPs can transform the business models of both production mills and technology leaders.
Most retailers have implemented multi-channel retailing strategies with the development of the platform economy. The existing literature ignores the effects of the complex competition between the ...strong-brand and weak-brand platform-based supply chains applying multi-channel retailing and consumers’ cross-brand-channel behavior on dynamic pricing (uniform vs. discrimination pricing). This study discusses the pricing dilemma in a more complex competition and fills the gap by modeling a 2*2 dynamic pricing Nash game between two multi-channel retailing supply chains. Our results show that when the competitor chooses uniform or discrimination pricing, the retailers should apply the same pricing strategy as the competitor. In addition, we find that uniform pricing vs. uniform pricing and discrimination pricing vs. discrimination pricing are Nash equilibrium results. Our analysis suggests that the scenario uniform vs. uniform pricing brings the highest profits to both supply chains and the strong-brand retailer but not to the weak-brand retailer.
Platform economy organizations often resolve fundamental organizing problems with novel solutions, thereby transforming their relationship with core stakeholders including regulators and workers. ...Despite the integral role played by platform workers, research on the interplay between platforms and regulatory conditions has yet to take workers into consideration. We investigate how Uber drivers engage with novel forms of organizing across different regulatory structures. Drawing on insights from resource dependence theory, we conduct a topic modeling analysis of drivers’ online forum posts and a complementary qualitative analysis of triangulated data sources. Our findings reveal that workers do not always succumb to organizing solutions imposed upon them; they also actively oppose or supplement them. Importantly, platform workers’ responses vary with the local regulatory structure, which affects the mutual dependency and balance of power between platforms and workers. We discuss implications for the literature on new forms of organizing and the platform economy.
This article aims to provide a more detailed conception of the production of urban digital divides by VGI platforms in the context of the platform economy, through the articulation of the first ...(access and coverage), second (usage and skills) and third (outcomes) level of the digital divide. Our conceptual approach departs from a discussion of the geographical consequences of the different levels of the digital divide, focusing on their application to the study of VGI platforms, especially those working under the logic of the platform economy. We draw on a multi-level case study of the geographies of TripAdvisor and the geographies of restaurants or similar establishments in Lisbon, which comprised data analysis and interviews with restaurant owners, to argue that VGI platforms are producing urban digital divides that can only be fully detected through the triangulation of the different levels of the digital divide. They are not only producing different levels of territorial coverage in cities, but also different levels of usage intensity which have caused negative and positive outcomes for the firms associated. All these levels are spatially distributed, and such distribution is even more pronounced at a finer scale. We conclude that VGI platforms are producing a myriad of new forms of spatial divides that need more attention, given that the digital divide is present within the mechanisms designed by digital platforms. The vast and complex effects of such data engineering is best captured when all three levels of the digital divide are taken into account.
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