The gig economy has low barriers to entry, enabling flexible work arrangements and allowing workers to engage in contingent employment, whenever, and in some cases, such as online labor markets, wherever workers desire. The growth of the gig economy has been partly attributed to technological...

Through a large-scale field study of 166,215 online restaurant reviews, we found evidence of a distance boosting effect, whereby experiencing spatial distance (i.e., authoring a review about a geographically distant restaurant, rather than proximate one) and temporal distance (i.e., authoring a...

This study examines the role of text-based direct messaging systems in online labor markets, which provide a communication channel between workers and employers, adding a personal touch to the exchange of online labor. We propose the effect of workers' use of the direct messaging system on...

Individuals are likely to exhibit different behaviors between mobile and non-mobile devices, for a number of reasons. For example, mobile devices enable ubiquitous access, through their portability, yet they also constrain users because of the smaller form factor. Very little work to date has...

Extending recent work on market mechanisms in new fintech offerings, we explore the implications of a key mechanism in online crowdfunding – the use of a provision point. Under a provision point mechanism (otherwise known as all-or-nothing or fixed fundraising scheme), the fundraiser,...

We theorize peer awards’ effects on the volume and novelty of creative user-generated content (UGC) produced at online platform communities. We then test our hypotheses via a randomized field experiment on Reddit, wherein we randomly and anonymously assigned Reddit’s Gold Award to 905...

Biases in online platforms pose a threat to social inclusion. We examine the influence of a novel source of bias in online philanthropic lending, namely that associated with religious differences. We first propose a measure of religion distance between pairs of countries, which we incorporate...

We consider the role of online dispute resolution (ex-post guarantees of supplier quality) when they are introduced in the presence of an online reputation system (an ex-ante informational mechanism), in the context of online service procurement platforms. We argue that dispute resolution will...

In hopes of motivating consumers to provide larger volumes of useful reviews, many retailers offer financial incentives. Here, we explore an alternative approach, social norms, wherein we inform people about the volume of reviews authored by peers. We test the effectiveness of using financial...

This study examines how social network integration (i.e., integration of online platforms with other social media services, for example, with Facebook or Twitter) can affect the characteristics of user-generated content (volume and linguistic features) in the context of online reviews. Building...