Social Evaluation Dynamics in Global Platform Markets

Abstract

Peer-to-peer platform markets have recently expanded on an unprecedented scale and changed the way many business activities are organized. Given their differences from traditional firm-based capitalist markets, this dissertation seeks to understand peer-to-peer market participants’ behavioral patterns and assess the repercussions of platforms’ efforts to engineer an efficient, transparent, and accessible market. Chapter 1 illustrates key differences between a peer-to-peer platform system and a traditional firm-based system, highlights opportunities to generate new economic sociological insights, and provides an overview of the three empirical studies included in this dissertation. Chapter 2, “Strategic Downward Selection: Evidence from a Peer-to-peer Platform Market”, reveals unintended consequence of instituting a performance evaluation system. Chapter 3, “Seal of Approval? Trust Signals and Cultural Distance in Global Peer-to-peer Platform Markets” shows the presence of cultural bias in exchange partner selection and how this may influence the effects of various quality signals. Chapter 4, “Markers of Mission Commitment: Career, Gender, and the Evaluation of Social Entrepreneurs”, shows the presence of social biases associated with career background and gender among crowd funders. Across these three empirical chapters, I leverage both quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze proprietary data, archival data, and experiment data. As the studies in this dissertation illustrate, despite the efforts to engineer a highly-functioning market, how economic transactions on these platforms eventually unfold are subject to social processes.