Digital Labor

Arun Sundararajan

person  

Arun Sundararajan is Professor and NEC Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He also heads the Social Cities Initiative at NYU’s Center for Urban Science+Progress, and is an affiliated faculty member at NYU’s Center for Data Science. Professor Sundararajan’s research program studies how digital technologies transform business and society. Some of his current and recent research focuses on the governance of digital spaces, collaborative consumption and the sharing economy, social media and cities, digital institutions, contagion in networks, privacy strategy, pricing in digital markets and managing online piracy. He has published in numerous scientific journals and has given more than 200 conference and invited presentations internationally. His research has been recognized by four Best Paper awards, been supported by organizations that include Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and IBM, and recently profiled by trade publications that include The Atlantic, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fast Company, the Financial Times, Forbes, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal. His op-eds and expert commentary have appeared in TIME Magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais, Wired, TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and Harvard Business Review, and on Al Jazeera, BBC News, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Fox, NPR, PBS and a variety of non-English language TV networks. He has served as Director of NYU Stern’s IS Doctoral Program since 2007, is one of the founders of the Workshop on Information in Networks, and is an advisor to OuiShare and the National League of Cities. He holds degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the University of Rochester. Follow him on Twitter @digitalarun.

An Economic Perspective on Cooperatives, Blockchain-Based Collectives and other Distributed Collaborative Organizations
If the “stock” of emerging sharing economy, on-demand, and peer-to-peer platforms and collectives are owned in part by their providers, a future of work populated by empowered micro-entrepreneurs rather than disenfranchised workers is more likely, and such a future may feature progressively lower inequality over time, since the “flows” associated with labor grow less rapidly than the returns from owning capital. I will discuss why provider-owned organizational structures are relatively uncommon in the United States, highlighting specific characteristics—diversity in provider contribution level and quality, rate of technological progress, and level of competition—that determine the relative economic efficiency of shareholder corporations and other ownership structures. I will also discuss some challenges associated with the “economic mechanisms” underlying emerging distributed collaborative organizations and blockchain collectives that use coin-based incentives, and how hybrid ownership structures may partially mitigate these challenges.


 
Making It Work
Fri, November 13
11:00 AM - 12:50 PM

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