Reputation Agent: Prompting Fair Reviews in Gig Markets

Our study presents a new tool, Reputation Agent, to promote fairer reviews from requesters (employers or customers) on gig markets. Unfair reviews, created when requesters consider factors outside of a worker's control, are known to plague gig workers and can result in lost job opportunities and even termination from the marketplace. Our tool leverages machine learning to implement an intelligent interface that: (1) uses deep learning to automatically detect when an individual has included unfair factors into her review (factors outside the worker's control per the policies of the market); and (2) prompts the individual to reconsider her review if she has incorporated unfair factors. To study the effectiveness of Reputation Agent, we conducted a controlled experiment over different gig markets. Our experiment illustrates that across markets, Reputation Agent, in contrast with traditional approaches, motivates requesters to review gig workers' performance more fairly. We discuss how tools that bring more transparency to employers about the policies of a gig market can help build empathy thus resulting in reasoned discussions around potential injustices towards workers generated by these interfaces. Our vision is that with tools that promote truth and transparency we can bring fairer treatment to gig workers.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, The Web Conference 2020, ACM WWW 202

Black box or hidden abode? The expansion and exposure of platform work managerialism

This Special Issue holds that managerialism is not an abstract, trans-historical category, and this article argues that neither is it hidden within an impenetrable black box. An important new form of managerialism is being revealed which is specific to what Moore and Joyce argue to be a very observable, and also widely contested, platform management model (PMM). Marx’s ‘hidden abode’ is a more appropriate metaphor than a black box, thus, given empirically demonstrable cases of control and resistance. Drawing on insights from labor process theory, the article reveals how control methods are at work, and transversally, how platform managerialism generates considerable levels of worker and union resistance. Despite its seeming inevitability and invincibility, platform managerialism is as knowable and as contestable, indeed, as contested, as other forms