Specialisation in the Digital Factory : An Empirical Analysis of Digital Crowdwork

This paper analyses the role of digital specialisation on the performance of crowdworkers of platform, considering both the digital and global nature of tasks completed on online global labour markets. Our analysis is based on a sample of 102,822 digital crowdworkers and 2,071 skills characterising their digital knowledge, collected in October 2021 on Freelancer.com. These skills are analysed as a network of knowledge to identify six areas of digital specialisation and existing knowledge interdependencies between skills. We then test multilevel models that appropriately distinguish country-level and individual-level drivers of performance.Our findings unequivocally confirm that digital specialisation is a major driver of performance of crowdworkers and represents a key feature of the individual human capital accumulation of online freelancers. Moreover, we show that geographical boundaries still matter in the digital context as they explain more than one third in the performance rating of crowdworkers given by their “employers”