Documents Shapiro, Aaron 2 results

"Why are unprofitable gig work platforms so highly valued? Recent scholarship argues that gig platforms configure their data and computational infrastructure as financial assets, and that this speculative valuation offsets monetary losses on ride-hailing and food-delivery services. At the root of this valuation, however, is a narrative of efficiency and optimization that has little bearing on platforms' on-the-ground operations. In practice, gig work platforms are remarkably inefficient. I build on Veblen's work on the business enterprise to argue that platforms' financial exceptionalism owes to their unique capacity to strategically insert inefficiencies within and beyond the market encounters they broker, a pattern that I call ‘platform sabotage.' The paper offers five vignettes of platform sabotage at work, illustrating how platforms target their strategic inefficiencies across various constituencies of market actors. The paper concludes with discussion of sabotage as a modality of platformization."

"On‐demand service firms secure market power by cultivating and operationalising calculative asymmetries between the platform and labour. In this article, I analyse dynamic (or ‘surge') pricing as an exemplary calculative technique. I show how the asymmetrical application of price‐setting allows firms to leverage control at the aggregate level while maintaining the façade of autonomy at the individual level, thereby legitimising workers' classification as independent contractors but solving the coordination problems that the classification introduces. The article complements and extends previous critical research into the platform or ‘on‐demand' service economy by analysing how management scientists model and simulate on‐demand marketplaces. I consider management science to be a calculative technique for optimising operational efficiency. A critical review of management science provides novel insights into platforms' efforts to monopolise calculative agency at the expense of other market participants. The article concludes by considering implications for broader critiques of platform labour management."