Platforms operators act as private regulators to increase usage and maximize profits. Their goals depend on the development of the platform: overcoming the chicken-egg problem early on requires attracting platform participants while quality becomes more important later on. Private regulators...

Despite some advantages over traditional (offline) labor markets - such as lower search costs, better matching and improved monitoring - online labor markets (OLMs) have not taken off as initially expected. In this paper, we study the factors that limit perceived project success on OLMs. Using...