A Typology of Online Labor Platforms

Online labor platforms, such as Uber, hold the potential to transform the nature of employment.  As the number of platforms continue to grow, the same term (platform) is being used to describe an increasingly large number of services, which belies much of the variability in their nature.  This typology serves to identify the important ways in which the platforms are similar, and in what ways they diverge.  Understanding the differences between platforms can help researchers uncover the ways these differences make a difference to the nature of work on the platforms.  This typology identifies and studies the attributes of 10 prominent types of platforms: Transportation, Microwork, Housework, Hospitality, Delivery, Therapy, Video, Freelance, Commerce, and Long-term Employment platforms.  Additionally, this paper compares the platforms to their real-life counterparts in order to identify in what ways the platforms represent new forms of work.