“The war of the worlds won't occur”: Decentralized evaluation systems and orders of worth in market organizations of the sharing economy

Abstract

Market organizations of the sharing economy have gained economic and social prominence. Most of these market organizations incorporate decentralized evaluation systems into their digital platform. However, these market organizations involve users and organizers with different ideas on what is valuable and what is not in sharing-economy transactions. Building on neo-institutional insights coupled with French pragmatist sociology, we investigate the role of decentralized evaluation systems in supporting/solving the co-existence and/or competition of several conceptions of worth in market organizations of the sharing economy.In a case study on the French peer-to-peer carpooling platform BlaBlaCar, we show that its decentralized evaluation system embodies the organizer's conception of what is valuable and only supports limited pluralism among users. We argue that incorporating a decentralized evaluation system in the digital platform of a market organization is not neutral: certain users prefer to self-exclude rather than to use the system to discriminate between potential future interlocutors. Although evaluations do not incorporate imposed criteria, they constitute proofs of worth in some worlds but not in others. Finally, this evaluation system creates room for several market organizations to co-exist.