Performance Implications of E-Lancers’ Precommitment Signals in Service Clouds: A Structured Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, “electronically connected freelancers (e-lancers)” (Malone and Laubacher 1998, p. 7) have started to build their own businesses via web-based platforms. We refer to these platforms as “service clouds” in which freelancers offer their services to potential contractors by maintaining profile pages to present and describe their expertise. Famous examples for these cloud-based social networks are upwork.com and freelancer.com. In this highly competitive environment, e-lancers are required to send signals to the market that are used as a mechanism to promote their services (e.g., quality certificates, guarantees, etc.). We propose to investigate different types of signals as mediators of the relationship between e-lancers’ personal traits and individual performance outcomes in service clouds. In this structured abstract, we focus on preliminary results regarding “precommitment” signals that are defined as the signaling of “the voluntary imposition of constraints” (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002, p. 219), such as self-imposed 24-h deadlines that are publicly promoted on profile pages. To assess performance implications, we draw on both survey data and objective measures collected using web-crawling technology.