What link between legitimacy and response to incentives on a crowdwork platform? The Foule Factory Case

Résumé 0

Using neo-institutionalist approach, crowdwork platforms can be considered as mesoinstitutions (Ménard [2014, 2018]), acting as regulators on their own labor market. As the legitimacy of a meso-institution influences the efficiency of its governance and of its incentive system (Ménard [2016]), the legitimacy of crowdwork platforms appears essential to guarantee workers’ effort. This paper therefore questions the link between the legitimacy of the platform as perceived by the micro-workers and their response to the incentives put in place. Based on a multiple correspondence analysis of a questionnaire conducted with workers of a French micro-tasking platform, we build two composite indexes for the legitimacy and the strength of the incentives to test a possible correlation. Our findings show that positive legitimacy is significantly related to strong effort incentives, but that this relationship becomes more tenuous as legitimacy and the strength of response to incentives decreases. Crowdwork platforms must therefore not neglect the perception of their legitimacy if they want to secure workers’ efforts and survive against other platforms.