Competition, Contracts, and Creativity: Evidence from Novel Writing in a Platform Market

Yanhui Wu () and Feng Zhu ()
Additional contact information
Yanhui Wu: HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong
Feng Zhu: Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Management Science, 2022, vol. 68, issue 12, 8613-8634

Abstract: A growing number of people today are participating in the gig economy, working as independent contractors on short-term projects. We study the effects of competition on gig workers’ effort and creativity on a Chinese novel-writing platform. Authors produce and sell their works chapter by chapter under a revenue-sharing or pay-by-the-word contract with the platform. Exploiting a regulation that induced a massive entry of novels in the romance genre but not other genres, we find that, on average, intensified competition led authors to produce content more quickly, whereas its effect on book novelty was weak. However, revenue-sharing books responded to competition substantially more than pay-by-the-word books, particularly regarding novelty. Moreover, the effect of competition on novelty is considerably stronger for books at earlier stages of the product life cycle. Finally, the platform increased the promotion of contracted books, which disproportionately favored pay-by-the-word books. We discuss the implications of these results for creative workers, platform firms, and policy makers in the gig economy.

Keywords: competition; contracts; creative production; platform bias; gig economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4329 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:68:y:2022:i:12:p:8613-8634

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().