Companies operating under the gig-worker model are offering full-time jobs to ensure better performance resulting from increased work availability. Using panel data from an online grocery platform offering flexible workhours, we explore if voluntary availability affects performance. We find that voluntary work positively affects productivity and service quality, controlling for worker and task-specific characteristics, and order batching, task complexity and discretion moderate the main effect.

Communication and customer interaction design have been used as elements to improve customer satisfaction and purchasing behavior, but little is known regarding their use as levers to improve operational efficiency. We show the relevance of communication channels as levers of operational performance and provide evidence that these channels can be used to manage customers’ expectations and improve operational performance.

The impact of formal incentives on team productivity is not fully understood and only a handful of field experiments have documented either a small or a null impact. In this study, we empirically explore their effect on individuals and teams. We calibrate a theoretical model to show that the null effect observed in teams is not due to formal incentives losing their effectiveness but because weak formal incentives display larger social incentives than teams with strong formal incentives.