Social Value Orientation among Freelancers

Online labor markets connect buyers with workers globally to assign various categories of tasks. A worker’s quality on the platform could be assessed by their past performance captured in a reputation system. However, prior reputation fails to capture real worker quality because they are skewed towards high positive values. Worker characteristics like skills, experience, and heuristic cues can help evaluate worker quality thereby affecting their performance on the online labor platform. In this study, we plan to explore how the social value orientation (SVO) of workers affects their performance in an online labor market. We extract workers\u27 SVO from their endorsement activity in an online labor market and determine its impact on their future performance on the platform. Our initial results show that cooperative and individualistic orientations positively affect a worker’s future gig performance as compared to workers who have neutral orientations