Unfreezing the Freelancers: Investigating the Strategy of Digital Platform-Based Instant Messaging Communication in Increasing Freelancers’ Response in Gig Economy

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology, the gig labor marketplace is fast growing, with digital platform-based instant messaging (IM) playing an important role in raising freelancers’ orders, serving the intention for the crowdsourcing platforms to increase capacity to balance supply and demand. Using a large-scale field experiment on a crowdsourcing freight platform, this study investigates the impact of IM on freelancers’ response rate of orders. Our findings suggest the effects of IM depend on its content and information richness level. Task-relevant information in IM increases the freelancers’ response rate, especially for the priority commitment information, compared with order price information. In addition, although adding task-irrelevant information in IM decreases the freelancers’ response rate, it does not mean the less task-irrelevant information results in a weaker negative IM effect. Rather than that, including task-irrelevant information with a medium information richness level in IM harms the freelancers’ response to the most significant extent. Moreover, our findings reveal crowdsourcing platforms’ actions of IM to increase freelancers’ response rate are consistent with the actions to improve the order acceptance rate, thus demonstrating the critical role of increasing freelancers’ response rate in raising their interest in the final acceptance of the order serving. Our findings guide crowdsourcing platforms to design effective digital platform-based IMs to communicate with freelancers to arouse their response and interest in serving the orders. The capacity of crowdsourcing platforms thus can be dynamically adjusted and expanded to benefit their profitability.