Online Labor Markets

In recent years, a number of online labor markets have emerged that allow workers from around the world to sell their labor to an equally global pool of buyers. The creators of these markets play the role of labor market intermediary by providing institutional support and remedying informational asymmetries. In this paper, I explore market creators' choices of price structure, price level and investment in platforms. I also discuss competition among markets and the business strategies employed by market creators. The paper concludes with a discussion of the productivity and welfare effects of online labor.

[1]  David Autor.  Wiring the Labor Market , 2000 .

[2]  R. Banker,et al.  Importance of Measures of Past Performance: Empirical Evidence on Quality of e-Service Providers* , 2008 .

[3]  Jean-Charles Rochet,et al.  Two-Sided Markets: An Overview ∗ , 2004 .

[4]  George A. Akerlof,et al.  The Market for “Lemons”: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism , 1970 .

[5]  Scott M. Carr.  Note on Online Auctions with Costly Bid Evaluation , 2003, Manag. Sci..

[6]  Thomas W. Malone,et al.  The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy , 1998, Wirtschaftsinformatik.

[7]  Lorin M. Hitt,et al.  Costly Bidding in Online Markets for IT Services , 2003, Manag. Sci..

[8]  Stephen S. Roach.  More Jobs, Worse Work , 2004 .

[9]  B. Caillaud,et al.  Chicken & Egg: Competition Among Intermediation Service Providers , 2003 .

[10]  P. Dasgupta,et al.  Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets : An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information , 2007 .

[11]  E. Moretti,et al.  Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers: Evidence from Winners and Losers of Large Plant Openings , 2009 .

[12]  E. Oster,et al.  Do Call Centers Promote School Enrollment? Evidence from India , 2010 .

[13]  James A. Robinson,et al.  Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth , 2005 .

[14]  David Autor,et al.  The Economics of Labor Market Intermediation: An Analytic Framework , 2008, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[15]  Lant Pritchett,et al.  The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the U.S. Border , 2008 .

[16]  O. Williamson.  Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations , 1979, The Journal of Law and Economics.

[17]  Michael Greenstone,et al.  Identifying Agglomeration Spillovers : Evidence from Million Dollar Plants , 2007 .

[18]  Paul R. Milgrom,et al.  A theory of auctions and competitive bidding , 1982 .

[19]  Erran Carmel,et al.  Is the World Really Flat? A Look at Offshoring in an Online Programming Marketplace , 2008, MIS Q..

[20]  Bengt Holmstrom,et al.  Moral Hazard and Observability , 1979 .