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A growing body of research finds that gig economy platforms use gamification to enhance managerial control. Focusing on technologically mediated forms of gamification, this literature reveals how platforms mobilize gig workers’ work effort by making the labour process resemble a game. This chapter contends that this tech-centric scholarship fails to fully capture the historical continuities between contemporary and much older occurrences of game-playing at work. Informed by interviews and participatory observations at two food delivery platforms in Amsterdam, I document how these platforms’ piece wage system gives rise to a workplace dynamic in which severely underpaid delivery couriers continuously employ game strategies to maximize their gig income. Reminiscent of observations from the early shop floor ethnographies of the manufacturing industry, I show that the game of gig income maximization operates as an indirect modality of control by (re)aligning the interests of couriers with the interests of capital and by individualizing and depoliticizing couriers’ overall low wage level. I argue that the new, algorithmic technologies expand and intensify the much older forms of gamified control by infusing the organizational activities of shift and task allocation with the logic of the piece wage game and by increasing the possibilities for interaction, direct feedback and immersion. My study contributes to the literature on gamification in the gig economy by interweaving it with the classic observations derived from the manufacturing industry and by developing a conceptualization of gamification in which both capital and labour exercise agency.

This paper aims to quantitatively explore the trends and patterns of the existing literature in the gig economy.

Using a total of 1,707 documents retrieved from the Scopus and Web of Science databases, bibliometric analysis using R-Biblioshiny and VOSviewer software was performed to map the studies in the gig economy.

The paper provides information on the most productive authors, countries and journals, as well as the emerging themes in gig research. It highlights the most prolific authors, with a notable presence from the USA and the UK, which are also the countries with the most publications and citations. China has also emerged prominently, both in terms of the number of publications and its involvement in thematic clusters and trending topics. Through co-word analysis and thematic clustering, the study provides information about emerging themes in gig economy studies, such as labor, technology, management and precarity. The results provide insightful information for comprehending the effects of gig labor in the contemporary workforce.

This study provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature related to the gig economy, exploring the key insights by highlighting the evolving trends in gig research.

By mapping thematic clusters, tracking research evolution and identifying trending topics, it provides a unique perspective on the field's development and emerging areas of focus. It serves as a valuable means for addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by the gig economy.

Smart-home security involves multilayered security challenges related to smart-home devices, networks, mobile applications, cloud servers and users. However, very few studies focus on smart-home users. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the potential interests of adult smart-home users in cybersecurity awareness training and nonfinancial rewards that may encourage them to adopt sound cybersecurity practices.

A total of 423 smart-home users between the ages of 25 and 64 completed a survey questionnaire for this study, with 224 participants from Japan and 199 from the UK.

Cultural factors considerably influence adult smart-home users’ attitudes toward cybersecurity. Specifically, cultural differences impact their willingness to participate in cybersecurity awareness training, their views on the importance of cybersecurity training for children and senior citizens and their preference for nonfinancial rewards as an incentive for good cybersecurity behavior. These results highlight the need to consider cultural differences and their potential impact when developing and implementing cybersecurity programs that target smart-home users.

This research has two main implications. First, it provides insights for information security professionals on the importance of designing cost-effective and time-efficient cybersecurity awareness training programs for smart-home users. Second, the findings may assist governments in establishing nonfinancial incentives to encourage greater uptake of cybersecurity practices among smart-home users.

The paper investigates whether adult smart-home users are willing to spend time and money to engage in cybersecurity awareness training and to encourage their children and elderly parents to participate in training, as well. In addition, the paper examines incentives, especially nonfinancial rewards, that may motivate adult smart-home users to adopt cybersecurity behaviors at home. Furthermore, the paper analyses demographic differences among smart-home users in Japan and the UK.

This study aims to identify and explore different risk typologies associated with consumer acceptance of purchase recommendations from voice assistants (VAs).

Drawing on components of perceived risk, consumer trust theory, and consumption value theory, a research model was proposed and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) with data from 482 voice shoppers.

The results reveal that, unlike risks associated with physical harm, privacy breaches, and security threats, a variety of other concerns—including financial, psychological, social, performance-related risks, time loss, and the overall perceived risks—significantly influence consumers' willingness to accept VAs purchase recommendations. The effect is mediated by trust in VA purchase recommendations and their perceived value. Different types of risk affect various consumption values, with functional value being the most influential. The model explains 58.6% of the variance in purchase recommendation acceptance and significantly elucidates the variance in all consumption values.

This study contributes crucial knowledge to understanding consumer decision-making processes as they increasingly leverage AI-powered voice-based dialogue platforms for online purchasing. It emphasizes recognizing diverse risk typologies associated with VA purchase recommendations and their impact on consumer purchase behavior. The findings offer insights for marketing managers seeking to navigate the challenges posed by consumers' perceived risks while leveraging VAs as an integral component of modern shopping environments.

In this chapter, we theorize about online freelancers’ approaches to work flexibility. Drawing from an ongoing digital ethnography of US-based online freelancers pursuing work on digital platforms, our data question the common conceptualizations around the flexibility of online freelancing. We posit that the flexibility of where to work, not when to work, is the most important attribute of their work arrangement. Our data show (1) the online freelancers in our study prefer the stability and sustainability of full-time work over freelancing when both are offered as remote options; (2) full-time remote employment increases these workers’ freelancing control / flexibility; (3) these workers keep freelance work options open even as they transition to more permanent full-time work arrangements. We discuss how these findings relate to workplace culture shifts and what this means for contemporary working arrangements. Our insights contribute to the discourses on knowledge-based gig work and for what it means to study individuals online.

The purpose of this study is to understand the scope and nature of information sharing as a form of workplace learning among gig workers.

Data were collected from public social media communities of gig workers in Thailand. In total, 338 posts and 3,022 comments on the posts were analyzed (data corpus N = 3,360). Thailand was selected for the context of this study given its high level of social media penetration, a high percentage of digital service consumption of internet users and the prevalence of app-based gig workers. This study used thematic analysis using inductive and semantic coding to generate themes.

Findings showed two overarching themes of information sharing, which included on-the-job experience and inquiries. One surprising finding was the extent to which gig workers used social media to help others even when it potentially undermined their success.

This study adds evidence to the role of information sharing in workplace learning and illustrates how gig workers who do not have access to traditional training and learning opportunities use social media communities to fill this need.

Given the surge of digitalization and internet infrastructure leading to the rise of gig work worldwide, this study provides a closer look at how gig workers are using social media communities to facilitate workplace learning and support one another amid otherwise difficult and insecure working conditions. It also discusses the role that culture plays in facilitating a cooperative rather than a competitive environment among drivers.

For an entrant platform in the on-demand service market, choosing an appropriate employment model is critical. This study explores how the entrant optimally chooses the employment model to achieve better performance and investigates the optimal pricing strategies and wage schemes for both incumbent and entrant platforms.

Based on the Hotelling model, the authors develop a game-theoretic framework to study the incumbent's and entrant's optimal service prices and wage schemes. Moreover, the authors determine the entrant's optimal employment model by comparing the entrant's optimal profits under different market configurations and analytically analyze the impacts of some critical factors on the platforms' decision-making.

This study reveals that the impacts of the unit misfit cost of suppliers or consumers on the pricing strategies and wage schemes vary with different operational efficiencies of platforms. Only when both the service efficiency of contractors and the basic employee benefits are low, entrants should adopt the employee model. Moreover, a lower unit misfit cost of suppliers or consumers makes entrants more likely to choose the contractor model. However, the service efficiency of contractors has nonmonotonic effects on the entrant's decision.

This study focuses on an entrant's decision on the optimal employment model in an on-demand service market, considering the competition between entrants and incumbents on both the supplier and consumer sides, which has not been investigated in the prior literature.

In spite of the merits of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing and social media, harm to consumers has prompted calls for AI auditing/certification. Understanding consumers’ approval of AI certification entities is vital for its effectiveness and companies’ choice of certification. This study aims to generate important insights into the consumer perspective of AI certifications and stimulate future research.

A literature and status-quo-driven search of the AI certification landscape identifies entities and related concepts. This study empirically explores consumer approval of the most discussed entities in four AI decision domains using an online experiment and outline a research agenda for AI certification in marketing/social media.

Trust in AI certification is complex. The empirical findings show that consumers seem to approve more of non-profit entities than for-profit entities, with the government approving the most.

The introduction of AI certification to marketing/social media contributes to work on consumer trust and AI acceptance and structures AI certification research from outside marketing to facilitate future research on AI certification for marketing/social media scholars.

For businesses, the authors provide a first insight into consumer preferences for AI-certifying entities, guiding the choice of which entity to use. For policymakers, this work guides their ongoing discussion on “who should certify AI” from a consumer perspective.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to introduce the topic of AI certification to the marketing/social media literature, provide a novel guideline to scholars and offer the first set of empirical studies examining consumer approval of AI certifications.

More and more workers in Western economies are operating as freelancers in the so-called “gig economy”, moving from one project – or gig – to the next. A lively debate revolves around the question as to whether this new employment relationship is actually good for innovation in the 21 st century economy. Proponents argue that in this gig process valuable knowledge is created and transferred from one organization to the next via freelancers through their sequence of temporary gigs or projects. Antagonists reason that freelancers are only hired as one-trick ponies on a transactional basis, where knowledge is neither created nor shared. In this study, we focus on the characteristics of gigs. Which project characteristics lead to increased engagement of freelancers, and hence to knowledge-sharing behavior? Our study suggests that the gig economy can indeed lead to increased knowledge sharing by and engagement of freelance workers, provided that organizations and freelancers structure and shape gigs in such a way that they: (1) not only suit the task requirements at hand and (2) fit with the acquired skills of the freelancer, but that these gigs also (3) leave ample of room for the freelancer’s individual growth and development of new skills. This suggests that innovative organizations will need to shape gigs in such a way that freelancers are not only hired for their expertise, but rather that gigs also provide a learning opportunity for freelancers.