The Aspen Institute's report Data on the Sharing & On-Demand Economy: What We Know and Don’t Know covers a lot of ground.
It provides an excellent summary of the existing research on this rapidly growing field.
But section 4 is our favorite section.
It covers what we don't know about the sharing/on-demand economy, which is a lot.
This section suggests 13 areas where we need further research.
While all 13 are important, we consider these 5 the most important:
1. A consensus around language and taxonomy: In case you hadn't noticed, there are a lot of names for these types of activities, including: gig economy, sharing economy, on-demand economy, platform economy and many more.
In addition to many different names, most studies have different definitions of what is and is not included as part of the gig/sharing/on-demand/platform/etc. economy.
The different names and definitions leads to much confusion. A set of standard terms and definitions would be very useful.
2. Net Income: most of the studies (including ours) have data about how much income workers in the sharing/on-demand economy make. But so far there's been no detailed, definitive study on this topic. The reason is this type of study is hard and requires studying both the revenues and the costs associated with this type of work. Hopefully a detailed study will be done by someone in the near future.
3. Financial Health: More work needs to be done on understanding the personal financial health of those doing this type of work.
4. Relationship to traditional labor market - Substitute, complement or interstitial?: This type of work plays a lot of roles for workers. Most do it part-time and many do it on an occasional basis, moving in and out of this type work on an as needed basis. Many of those doing it part-time have other jobs, others do it full-time. What the drivers of all these types of motivations and what does it mean in terms of pay and benefit requirements.
5. Is this type of work the new safety net, or does this type of work need a new safety net, or both: Our most recent research shows a large percentage of those working in the sharing/on-demand economy are doing so to help them get through or recover from a hardship of some kind (job loss, health problem, major unexpected expense, etc.). In this sense, this type of work is a new safety net, providing a low friction to easily and flexibly earn more income.
But this type of work provides little or no traditional benefits and the amount income earned is unpredictable. This means these workers may need access to new types of benefits and safety nets.
As the report points out, there's a lot of work to be done and "no single organization or entity will be able to answer all of the questions" about this type of work.
We're in the field with the year two, 2nd wave of the Intuit On-Demand Workforce study. This year's work includes more focus on the issues of financial health and how this work relates to traditional jobs. We're also looking at safety net issues.
We'll have more on these topics in the coming months.
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