Moral Hazards and Effects of Enhanced Monitoring Systems in Online Labor Markets

This paper investigates how IT-enabled monitoring systems mitigate moral hazard in an online labor market and their effect on market competition. We exploit a quasi-experiment at Freelancer when it introduced an IT-enabled monitoring system in 2015. We use a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to identify the treatment effect of the monitoring system on employer contractor choice, market competition, and employer surplus. We found that the IT-enabled monitoring system lowers the employers’ willingness to pay the reputation premiums. Meanwhile, comparing the trend of the control group, the IT-enabled monitoring system raised the employer surplus in hourly projects and increased the number of bids. Our result suggests that IT-enabled monitoring systems have a significant effect on alleviating moral hazards, reducing agency costs, and facilitating market competition.