Can You Gig It? An Empirical Examination of the Gig Economy and Entrepreneurial Activity

By Gordon Burtch, Seth Carnahan, Brad N. Greenwood. Management Sciences, 2018

458 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine how the entry of gig-economy platforms influences local entrepreneurial activity. On one hand, such platforms may reduce entrepreneurial activity by offering stable employment for the un- and under-employed. On the other hand, such platforms may enable entrepreneurial activity by offering work flexibility that allows the entrepreneur to re-deploy resources strategically in order to pursue her nascent venture. To resolve this tension, we exploit a natural experiment, the entry of the ride-sharing platform Uber X and the on-demand delivery platform Postmates into local areas. We examine the effect of each on crowdfunding campaign launches at Kickstarter, the world’s largest reward-based crowdfunding platform. Results indicate a negative and significant effect on crowdfunding campaign launches, and thus local entrepreneurial activity, after entry of Uber X or Postmates. Strikingly, the effect appears to accrue primarily to unfunded and under-funded projects, suggesting that gig-economy platforms predominantly reduce lower quality entrepreneurial activity by offering viable employment for the un- and under-employed. We corroborate our findings with US Census data on self-employment, which indicate similar declines following the entry of Uber X, and with a small scale survey of gig-economy participants.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87174d248dbcd17328fdaa85cda89535cacf2088

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Information Systems

1. Ola Henfridsson
2. Geoffrey G. Parker

In Marketing

1. Geoffrey G. Parker
2. Panos Constantinides
3. J. Slageren
4. Ola Henfridsson
5. Nikos Koutsimpogiorgos
6. Koen Frenken
7. A. Herrmann

In Sociology and Political Science

1. J. Slageren
2. Panos Constantinides
3. Ola Henfridsson
4. Nikos Koutsimpogiorgos
5. Koen Frenken
6. A. Herrmann

Citations in the corpus

• Conceptualizing the Gig Economy and Its Regulatory Problems (2020, background): “Others refer to the gig economy as “ digital labor markets ” without further definition (Burtch et al., 2018; De Stefano, 2015; Eichhorst et al., 2017).”
• Introduction - Platforms and Infrastructures in the Digital Age (2018, background): “A recent study by Burtch et al. (2018) even shows that entrepreneurs may choose to work on online labor platforms as freelancers rather than try to pursue entrepreneurial projects of relatively low quality.”