The Interplay of Earnings, Ratings, and Penalties on Sharing Platforms: An Empirical Investigation

On-demand delivery through sharing platforms represents a rapidly expanding segment of the global workforce. The emergence of sharing platforms enables gig workers to choose when and where to work, allowing them to do so in a flexible manner. However, such flexibility brings notorious challenges to platforms in managing the gig workforce. Thus, understanding the incentive and behavioral issues of gig workers in this new business model is inherently meaningful. This paper investigates how the incentive mechanisms of sharing platforms—earnings, ratings, and penalties—affect the working decisions of gig workers and their nuanced relationships. To achieve this goal, we use data from one leading on-demand delivery platform with more than 50 million active consumers in China and implement a two-stage Heckman model with instrumental variables to estimate the impact of earnings, ratings, and penalties. We first show that better ratings motivate gig workers to work more. However, interestingly, when ratings are employed together with earnings, the two positive effects of ratings and earnings can be substitutes for each other. Second, we reveal that higher past penalties discourage workers from working more, whereas, interestingly, workers with higher past penalties tend to be more sensitive toward an increase in earnings. Finally, we conduct follow-up surveys to understand the underlying mechanisms of the observed moderating effects from both psychological and economic perspectives. The ultimate goal of this work is to provide managerial implications to help platform managers understand how earnings, ratings, and penalties work together to affect gig workers’ working decisions and how to manage high- and low-quality workers. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, entrepreneurship and innovation. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72192823, 72172169, 71821002, 91646125, 72071206, 72231011, 72025405, and 72088101] and Program for Innovation Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4761 .