This three-year research project investigating the digital platform economy includes a multidisciplinary team of scholars at Northeastern University and Boston College with expertise in law, social science and engineering. Together we will develop and test the idea of “comprehensive platform optimization,” where a platform owner is able to optimize for profit and efficiency, government regulators for the public good, and workers for greater income, flexibility and control of workplace conditions. Our aim is to address several problems revealed by earlier research on the platform economy: that many platform companies are not profitable, raising questions about the sustainability of the business model; that workers are low-paid, lack meaningful control over working conditions, and drop out at high rates; and that government authorities have had little success at regulating the underlying business activity that platforms make possible, in turn limiting their ability to constrain negative effects on the public good.
Our team’s first paper, Is employment status compatible with the on-demand platform economy? Evidence from a natural experiment, can be found here.