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Established economic practices and social relations currently face the pressures of what has recently become known as the platform economy (Kenney & Zysman, 2016). The word ‘platform’is used in a variety of ways (Langley & Leyshon, 2016) and refers to what Evans and Gawer (2016) generally term ‘transaction platforms’. Some social media platforms such as Facebook or YouTube post content mainly to host user communities. Other Internet platforms provide digital marketplaces for paid transactions, ranging from crowdsourcing of creative ideas to the digital sale of products and services (Langley & Leyshon, 2016; Aspers & Darr, 2017). Focusing on digital marketplaces, the platform economy provides sociotechnical infrastructures that facilitate new forms of Internet intermediation between buyers and external sellers that are not directly employed or contracted by the platform. Many of these digital marketplaces introduce novel economic practices.

Several prominent and successful organizers of digital marketplaces depict themselves as a part of the sharing economy–a general term that evokes non-market notions of a community orientation, empowerment, and social transformation (Schor, 2014; Mair & Reischauer, 2017) and revolves around the basic idea that existing goods and services are shared or traded with others in a peer-to-peer fashion, eliminating intermediaries from value distribution (Schor & Fitzmaurice, 2015). In stark contrast, platforms such as Airbnb (for temporary accommodation), Rover (for pet sitting), Getaround (for car sharing), Uber and Lyft (for ride sharing), TaskRabbit (for freelance