Two-sided platforms are typically plagued with asymmetric information, limiting market efficiency. Situated in the context of the increasingly popular online platforms for labor contracting (herein referred to as “online labor markets”), this paper investigates whether the implementation of...

Two-sided online platforms are typically plagued with hidden information (adverse selection) and hidden actions (moral hazard), limiting market efficiency. Situated in the context of the increasingly popular online platforms for labor contracting (herein referred to as “online labor...

We study the nature of home bias in online employment, wherein the employers prefer workers from their own home countries. Using a unique large-scale dataset from a major online labor platform, we identify employers' home bias in their online employment decisions. Moreover, we find that...

This paper investigates how IT-enabled monitoring systems mitigate moral hazard in an online labor market and their effect on market competition. We exploit a quasi-experiment at Freelancer when it introduced enhanced offline tracking features in 2015. Using a large dataset including 17,827...

This research shows that auction duration and description are two essential auction design parameters that function as screening mechanisms for bidder quality on popular online outsourcing platforms that use buyer-determined reverse auctions in order to find service providers. Using data from a...

We explore whether there is a gender wage gap in the gig economy and examine to what degree gender differences in job application strategy could account for the gap. With a large-scale dataset from a leading online labor market, we show that females only earn around 81.4% of the hourly wage of...

Monitoring, a digital surveillance technology that allows employers to track the activities of workers, is ubiquitous in the gig economy where workforce is distributed. However, workers are often reluctant to be monitored due to privacy concerns, resulting in a hidden economic cost for employers...

We design a series of online performance feedback interventions that aim to motivate the production of user-generated content (UGC). Drawing on social value orientation (SVO) theory, we develop a novel set of alternative feedback message framings, aligned with cooperation (i.e., your content...