Understanding the Skill Provision in Gig Economy from A Network Perspective

Abstract

The recent emergence of gig economy facilitates the exchange of skilled labor by allowing workers to showcase and sell their skills to a global market. Despite the recent effort on thoroughly examining who workers in gig economy are and what their experience in gig economy are like, our knowledge on how exactly workers provide their skills in gig economy, and how worker's strategies of providing and expanding skills relate to their success in gig economy is still lacking. In this paper, we conduct a case study on a prominent gig economy platform, Fiverr.com, to better understand the provision of skills on it through large-scale, data-driven analysis. In particular, we propose the concept of "skill space" from a network perspective to characterize the relationship between different skills by measuring how frequently workers provide different skills together. Through our analysis, we reveal interesting patterns in worker's provision of skills on Fiverr. We then show how these patterns change over time and differ across subgroups of workers with different characteristics. In addition, we find that providing a set of skills that are highly-related with each other correlates with a better overall performance in gig economy, and when workers expand their skillsets, expanding to a new skill that is highly-related to the existing skills takes less time and is associated with better performance on the new skill. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for gig economy workers and platform in general.

Cut me some slack! An exploration of slack resources and technology-mediated human capital investments in entrepreneurship

“…While skill development in the gig economy remains relatively understudied, skills are still seen as an important aspect of this new form of work (see Ashford et al. (2018) and Huang et al. (2019)).…”

“…Although skill development may not be among their stated goals, gig economy platforms and applications that digitally connect workers with customers through short-term employment contracts may also allow their users to develop important skills. While skill development in the gig economy remains relatively understudied, skills are still seen as an important aspect of this new form of work (see Ashford et al (2018) and Huang et al (2019)). In the same way that a student can take an online programming class to increase their chances of finding a coding job, gig workers can seek out "gigs" that will help them develop skills for new employment opportunities in the future.…”

Socio‐technical issues in the platform‐mediated gig economy: A systematic literature review: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…On Upwork, the platform uses a ranking tool called the JSS which affects gig worker's ability to bid for jobs; Kinder et al (2019) found that it is difficult for newcomers to get a high JSS until they complete some contracts that result in good reviews. Similarly, Fiverr assigns a "level" to workers based on their activity, performance, and reputation, and workers with higher levels obtain certain benefits when bidding for jobs (Huang et al, 2019). Therefore, there is an entry barrier for new workers, which leads many to bid lower for the same jobs at the very beginning of their employment than will more established workers (Lukac & Grow, 2021).…”

Design Opportunities for Freelancing Platforms: Online Freelancers’ Views on a Worker-Centred Design Fiction

“…Participants associated entrepreneurial development with keeping domain specific skills updated, but most importantly, learning the essentials of freelance practice (e.g., dealing with clients, managing different projects, and sensemaking of feedback). Huang et al [42] suggest that platforms are in a strong position to encourage freelancers to develop relevant skills. Our findings confirm and expand this notion by showing that platforms can further promote the development of entrepreneurial skills.…”