RSSE: Estrella Gómez Herrera (U. of Balearic Islands) Do Workers Bear the Burden of Fee Increases on Online Labor Platforms?

V rámci Research Seminar Series in Economics máme tu čest, že nám ve čtvrtek 13.10.2022 od 12:45 do 14:15 v místnosti RB437 bude přednášet prof. Estrella Gomez-Herrera z Univerzity na Baleárských ostrovech, která přednese o svém výzkumném projektu s názvem „Do Workers Bear the Burden of Fee Increases on Online Labor Platforms? Empirical Evidence From More Than 3.3 Million Bids“.

BIO: Prof. Gomez-Herrera is an economist and visiting professor in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Balearic Islands. She has previously worked at the European Commission, JRC. Her current research focuses on the effects of digitization on the economy and society, with a special focus on online labour markets platforms. Her works also cover topics in international economics and trade.

ABSTRACT: We study the effects of a fee change on users in a two-sided online labour market. We exploit an exogenous variation in service fees implemented by the platform. Workers are charged the fee proportional to their monthly earnings. We find that workers that incur higher platform fees (treated workers) attempt to pass-on the fee increase to the employers, i.e., they make higher bids to projects. We find that this pass-on strategy is not successful as treated workers have a lower probability to win the competition for contracts while they do not obtain higher wage bills. Overall, we find a negative treatment effect on worker revenue. We also explore the effect of higher platform fees on labor demand, labor supply and equilibrium wages. We find that the share of treated workers in a market positively affects the supply of labor while it does not affect labor demand or equilibrium wages. For the platform, the fee increase is effective as it substantially increased profits and the share of platform fees on total turnover.