Workers in the crowd: the labor market impact of the online platform economy

Abstract

We compare individuals engaged in online crowdwork against workers in traditional occupations from the United States and Europe, investigating the determinants of access into crowd employment and the nature of the deterioration of salary conditions and job quality characterizing these markets. We do so by matching responses from comparable working conditions surveys, and controlling for most individual and socio-economic characteristics affecting pay. We find that most differences in earnings are largely unexplained by the ability of individuals, and that labor in crowdwork is vastly under-utilized.

Piecework and Job Search in the Platform Economy

“…Access to traditional markets will inevitably affect the amount of time that can be allocated to platform work, so it is important to control for these factors. As discussed in Cantarella and Strozzi (2021), the inclusion of these occupation controls does not constitute a "bad control" situation, as these conditions relate to outcomes that often predate access into platforms. As such, they can actually be…”

“…emerging from this match-making process alone. Empirical evidence about the platform economy suggests that these markets might be subject to high level of unpaid work in the form of job search, as workers end up working more hours on the platform than what expected, as they face difficulties in finding available tasks (Cantarella and Strozzi, 2021;Barcevičius et al, 2021;Bogliacino et al, 2020;Berg et al, 2018).…”

“…First, we re-evaluate the monopsonistic premium of online labour platforms in the context of piecework. The literature has mostly focused the monopsony power of these labour markets (Dube et al, 2020;Cantarella and Strozzi, 2021;Kingsley et al, 2015), but the role of piecework and search is less explored and, as discussed, evidence on labour supply elasticities remain mixed. While some contributions have delineated platforms' piecework power in general terms (Lehdonvirta, 2018;Alkhatib et al, 2017;Davis and Hoyt, 2020), no explicit attempts to analyse the economic implications of piecework have been made.…”

A bibliometric analysis and future research agenda for online labour platforms

“…The development of OLPs has, however, been widely criticised. For instance, OLPs generally provide poor working conditions compared to traditional labour agreements (Cantarella and Strozzi 2021). Other studies find that they are unfair by design (Fieseler, Bucher and Hoffmann 2017) or provide only an illusion of autonomy (Sloth Laursen, Nielsen and Dyreborg 2021).…”

Contract Choice, Moral Hazard and Performance Evaluation Evidence from Online Labor Markets

“…Moreover, the direct contribution of freelancing to the economy is over $1 trillion, nearly 5% of the U.S. GDP. Recent studies also show that many workers consider OLMs as a substitute source of income for full-time employment because online work shortens the search time between jobs, reducing the duration of unemployment (Borchert et al, 2018;Cantarella & Strozzi, 2021).…”