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What seems straightforward to many Westerners is often a hurdle for workers in India, where people's homes often lack a formal address. This was the case for Joseph. Unable to offer a postal address that satisfied MTurk's requirements, he bought an account for an agency and used its address - a com…

One of the challenges for those doing ghost work is that there's no agreement about the social status or baggage that comes with it. Is it a dead-end trap, no different from the piecework of the first decades of the last century, or a hip gig that ggives someone the ultimate flexibility? People who…

Because platforms get their revenue from the requeters, it is not surprising that they, intentionally or not, confer more market power to requesters. Platforms also have the power to unilaterally decide who does and doesn't hjave access to their platform. [...]

[...] Requesters overwhelmingly expected workers to have their own software tools to bring to the job [...] A full-time employee would be given all the software tools necessary to do his or her job. But in the on-demand labor setting, this cost is transferred to the workers. [...] Requesters can im…

Ghost work economies sell themselves as software that can eliminate the expensive frictions of searching, matching, training, communicating with, and retaining workers. Yet, as Coase might have warned, communication and coordination among workers, and between workers and their employers, not only i…