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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Being the Boss: Gig Workers' Value of Flexible Work

By: Laura Katsnelson and Felix Oberholzer-Gee
Workers who join the gig economy face a challenging trade-off. Gig work provides worktime flexibility and a sense of being one’s own boss, but gig workers forgo certain protections that employees enjoy. In this paper, we study the work patterns of a large sample of... View Details
Keywords: Gig Workers; Flexible Work Arrangements; Worker Welfare; Labor; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms
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  • November 2022
  • Case

Para: Pay Transparency and Gig Drivers' Rights

By: Christopher Stanton and George Gonzalez
The case presents the founding vision and early days of a young startup that seeks to empower delivery drivers with tools and transparency. The company's flagship mobile app has been taken up by tens of thousands of delivery drivers across major U.S. cities who use it... View Details
Keywords: Gig Workers; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Applications and Software; Disruptive Innovation; Compensation and Benefits; Technology Industry; San Francisco
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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Who Benefits from Online Gig Economy Platforms?

By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
Online labor platforms for short-term, remote work have many more job seekers than available jobs. Despite their relative abundance, workers capture a substantial share of the surplus from transactions. We draw this conclusion from demand estimates that imply workers'... View Details
Keywords: Gig Economy; Knowledge Workers; Online Platforms; Employment; Internet and the Web; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Wages; Digital Platforms
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  • September 24, 2021
  • Article

A Labor Movement for the Platform Economy

By: Li Jin, Scott Duke Kominers and Lila Shroff
Platforms are fundamentally changing the contract between workers and companies—and the workers and creatives that create value for platform companies, and rely on platforms for their livelihoods, often have little power when it comes to getting their concerns... View Details
Keywords: Gig Workers; Decentralized Collective Action; Internet and the Web; Labor; Labor and Management Relations; Digital Platforms
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  • November–December 2023
  • Article

Look the Part? The Role of Profile Pictures in Online Labor Markets

By: Isamar Troncoso and Lan Luo
Profile pictures are a key component of many freelancing platforms, a design choice that can impact hiring and matching outcomes. In this paper, we examine how appearance-based perceptions of a freelancer’s fit for the job (i.e., whether a freelancer "looks the part"... View Details
Keywords: Freelancers; Gig Workers; Demographics; Prejudice and Bias; Selection and Staffing; Jobs and Positions; Analytics and Data Science
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  • 20 Sep 2021
  • Research & Ideas

How Much Is Freedom Worth? For Gig Workers, a Lot.

For some gig workers, losing the flexibility to set their own schedules is equivalent to taking a 17 percent pay cut, according to new research that explores the wages and work habits of DoorDash drivers. App-based platforms that allow... View Details
Keywords: by Lane Lambert; Technology
  • 28 Apr 2022
  • Research & Ideas

Can You Buy Creativity in the Gig Economy?

workers to get their creative juices flowing. “It turns out, on average, these gig workers are very responsive to competition,” says Zhu, who co-authored the forthcoming... View Details
Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds
  • December 2022
  • Article

Competition, Contracts, and Creativity: Evidence from Novel Writing in a Platform Market

By: Yanhui Wu and Feng Zhu
A growing number of people today are participating in the gig economy, working as independent contractors on short-term projects. We study the effects of competition on gig workers' effort and creativity on a Chinese novel-writing platform. Authors produce and sell... View Details
Keywords: Gig Workers; Platform-based Markets; Novel Writing; Creative Production; Platform Bias; Employment; Digital Platforms; Creativity; Books; Competition; Contracts
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  • January 2021 (Revised March 2022)
  • Case

Brigad: The Future of Work

By: Nien-he Hsieh, Elena Corsi and Daniela Beyersdorfer
In 2019 Florent Malbranche, CEO and co-founder of the French tech startup Brigad, pondered the next growth steps. Founded in 2015, Brigad’s objective was two-fold: to help restaurants and bars find qualified staff for punctual shifts, and to make it easier for... View Details
Keywords: Platform Business; Gig Economy; Regulation; Entrepreneurship; Marketplace Matching; Growth and Development Strategy
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  • 07 Nov 2023
  • Research & Ideas

When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'

graphic design. Freelancers constituted 36 percent of the US workforce in 2021, according to Upwork, a freelance platform. Aiming to establish trust in this largely virtual gig world, many platforms encourage freelancers to include a... View Details
Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis
  • November–December 2020
  • Article

Rethinking the On-Demand Workforce

By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Allison Bailey and Nithya Vaduganathan
As companies struggle with chronic skills shortages and changing labor demographics, a new generation of talent platforms, offering on-demand access to highly trained workers, has begun to help. These platforms include marketplaces for premium expertise (such as Toptal... View Details
Keywords: Talent Acquisition; Platforms; Skilled Labor Recruitment; Gig Economy; Talent and Talent Management; Selection and Staffing; Internet and the Web; Strategy; Digital Platforms
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  • 17 Nov 2020
  • Research & Ideas

Why a Blended Workforce May Be Key to Lasting Competitive Advantage

approach. Getting full value from highly skilled gig workers requires more than simply hiring them. Few companies have developed cultures that accommodate transient, outside talent; few managers are adept at... View Details
Keywords: by Joseph B. Fuller
  • April 2019 (Revised March 2020)
  • Case

Handy: The Future of Work? (A)

By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Kieron Stopforth
Witnessing numerous lawsuits alleging that online platform companies misclassified workers as contractors when they were actually employees, Handy’s founders faced a series of decisions. Handy was an online platform business that enabled customers to book appointments... View Details
Keywords: Employment; Working Conditions; Entrepreneurship; Compensation and Benefits; Internet and the Web; Ethics; Fairness; Service Industry; United States
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  • 07 Jul 2019
  • HBS Case

Walmart's Workforce of the Future

private employer in the United States, with 1.5 million workers (2.2 million worldwide). But that size and dominance doesn’t make Walmart immune to pressures faced by any other retail operation. In the second-year Harvard Business School... View Details
Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Retail
  • 01 Jul 2021
  • Office Hours

Readers Ask: Which Companies Are Transforming Work?

compensation, how can managers motivate and promote freelancers? "Managers can motivate part-timers or gig workers in several ways. The first is to make them feel fully included in the group. The second is... View Details
Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Manufacturing
  • 19 Jan 2022
  • In Practice

7 Trends to Watch in 2022

talent would be better served to consider how they can reshape their job descriptions to retain talent fed up with fulfilling various corporate process “requirements” or how to make themselves attractive together to gig View Details
Keywords: by HBS News
  • 07 Jan 2015
  • Research & Ideas

The Quest for Better Layoffs

liability standards, Feuerstein ended up spending more money than he had. And the company went bankrupt. View VideoA middle-aged worker whose job was replaced by automation reflects on how the loss changed her life. As with many HBS... View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Manufacturing

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