Research on Digital Labor Platforms accepted at International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)

Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, Clickworker, Prolific, Fiverr and others represent digital labor platforms that enable workers to earn money while fulfilling tasks. What’s the difference among these platforms, apart from the types of services they mediate (e.g., Uber: driving; Prolific: complete surveys)? In this conference paper we propose that the distribution of decision rights among workers, clients and the platform owner varies to a wide extent. We analyzed the work processes on 106 digital labor platforms in depth and find that some platforms, e.g., Uber retain most decision rights, while others distribute decision rights to workers and clients in some (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) or most (e.g., Upwork) work processes.

We are delighted to present the paper at ICIS 2021 in person and are looking forward to interesting discussions and feedback on our research.

Reference: Schulze, L., Trenz, M., and Nickerson, R. C. 2021. “Fingers in the Pie: Characterizing Decision Rights Partitioning on Digital Labor Platforms,” in Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Austin, TX, pp. 1–16.

Link: https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2021/is_future_work/is_future_work/1/

Photo credits: Association for Information Systems