Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
7-2022
Abstract
The proliferating gig economy relies on online freelance marketplaces, which support relatively anonymous interactions through text-based messages. Informational asymmetries thus arise that can lead to exchange uncertainties between buyers and freelancers. Conventional marketing thought recommends reducing such uncertainty. However, uncertainty reduction and uncertainty management theories indicate that buyers and freelancers might benefit more from balancing-rather than reducing-uncertainty, such as by strategically adhering to or deviating from common communication principles. With dyadic analyses of calls for bids and bids from a leading online freelance marketplace, this study reveals that buyers attract more bids from freelancers when they provide moderate degrees of task information and concreteness, avoid sharing personal information, and limit the affective intensity of their communication. Freelancers' bid success and price premiums increase when they mimic the degree of task information and affective intensity exhibited by buyers. However, mimicking a lack of personal information and concreteness reduces freelancers' success, so freelancers should always be more concrete and offer more personal information than buyers. These contingent perspectives offer insights into buyer-seller communication in two-sided online marketplaces. They clarify that despite, or sometimes due to, communication uncertainty, both sides can achieve success in the online gig economy.
Keywords
online freelance marketplaces, gig economy, multi-sided platforms, business-to-business exchange, uncertainty management, text analysis
Discipline
Marketing | Organizational Behavior and Theory
Research Areas
Marketing
Publication
Journal of Marketing
Volume
86
Issue
4
First Page
141
Last Page
161
ISSN
0022-2429
Identifier
10.1177/00222429211030841
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
LUDWIG, Stephan; HERHAUSEN, Dennis; GREWAL, Dhruv; BOVE, Liliana; BENOIT, Sabine; DE RUYTER, Ko; and URWIN, Peter.
Communication in the gig economy: Buying and selling in online freelance marketplaces. (2022). Journal of Marketing. 86, (4), 141-161.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/7576
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211030841