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How Much Do Platform Workers Value Reviews? An Experimental Method

Published: 28 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Previous qualitative work has documented that platform workers place an immense importance on their reputation due to the use of algorithmic management by online labor platforms. We provide a general experimental method, which can be used across platforms and time, for numerically quantifying the intensity with which platform workers experience reputation system-based algorithmic management. Our method works via an experiment where workers choose between a monetary bonus or a positive review. We demonstrate this method by measuring the value that freelancers assigned to positive feedback on Upwork in June 2020. The median freelancer in our sample valued a single positive review at ∼ $49 USD. We also find that less experienced freelancers valued a positive review more highly than those with more experience. Qualitative data collected during the experiment indicates that many freelancers considered issues related to reputation system-based algorithmic management while choosing between the monetary reward and the positive review.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2022
10459 pages
ISBN:9781450391573
DOI:10.1145/3491102
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 28 April 2022

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Author Tags

  1. algorithmic management
  2. behavioral experiment
  3. crowdsourcing
  4. online labor market
  5. reputation
  6. upwork

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CHI '22
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CHI '22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 29 - May 5, 2022
LA, New Orleans, USA

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