Leveraging the Experience: Exploration and Exploitation in Gig Worker Learning Process
59 Pages Posted: 20 May 2022 Last revised: 19 Jan 2024
Date Written: May 11, 2022
Abstract
The advent of on-demand delivery facilitated by gig platforms is ushering in a new era of business operations, workforce management, and customer experiences. Leveraging data from a prominent on-demand delivery platform in Asia, this study aims to explore the impact of experience on gig worker productivity and service quality within this emerging business context. First, in line with existing literature, we find that experience plays a crucial role in enhancing worker productivity, particularly when experience is not overly high. However, we also observe an interesting pattern in service quality, which initially declines with accumulating experience but eventually improves.
To understand these findings, we first show that experience leads to improvement in order processing times, resulting in increased productivity. Additionally, gig workers tend to strategically choose higher-earning orders to enhance their earnings per hour, particularly when they have limited experience. Next, to further explain the initial decrease in service quality and how workers subsequently achieve a better balance between productivity and quality, we propose an exploration-exploitation behavioral mechanism. We find that in the initial exploration phase, gig workers prioritize delivering individual (non-batched) orders to explore new stores and recipient regions and acquire delivery knowledge to improve productivity. However, this exploratory approach, especially at lower experience levels, can lead to a decrease in service quality due to visits to unfamiliar places. As gig workers accumulate experience during this exploration phase, they tend to transition towards batching more orders and concentrating their efforts on familiar recipient regions and stores. This shift marks the exploitation stage, during which experience plays a crucial role in improving service quality.
Keywords: learning, exploration, exploitation, gig workers, sharing platform, productivity, quality, empirical.
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