Trust and power in Airbnb’s digital rating and reputation system

Abstract

Customer ratings and reviews are playing a key role in the contemporary platform economy. To establish trust among strangers without having to directly monitor platform users themselves, companies ask people to evaluate each other. Firms like Uber, Deliveroo, or Airbnb construct digital reputation scores by combining these consumer data with their own information from the algorithmic surveillance of workers. Trustworthy behavior is subsequently rewarded with a good reputation score and higher potential earnings, while untrustworthy behavior can be algorithmically penalized. However, can these technologies themselves be trusted? Are they reliable communicators of trustworthy market behavior and do they fairly distribute the benefits and burdens of the online economy among platform companies, consumers, and workers? The implementation of Digital Reputation Systems (DRSs) has obvious advantages, like reducing adjudication costs and enhancing consumer trust, but there are also disadvantages that are predominantly offloaded on workers. Taking Airbnb’s DRS as my case study, I use Stephan Lessenich’s theory of the externalization society to argue that DRSs concentrate the benefits of the platform economy among consumers and platform companies while pushing negative externalities mostly unto workers.