4 DATA AND MEASURE
We contacted the company, Freelancer.com, to
collect data for a reasonable sample of project
owners and freelancers. At the time of writing this
proposal, freelancer.com has almost 25 million
registered users and about 12 million posted jobs.
Types of jobs range from IT, website design,
product sourcing and manufacturing, data entry,
business services and marketing, language
translation, sales and marketing, and engineering
and science. Freeleancer.com website says: “We
have experts representing every technical,
professional and creative field, providing a full
range of solutions: Small jobs, large jobs, anything
in-between, fixed price or hourly terms, Specific
skills, cost and schedule requirements. Just give us
the details of your project and our freelancers will
get it done faster, better, and cheaper than you could
possibly imagine. Your jobs can be as big or small
as you like, and be fixed price or hourly. You can
even specify the schedule, costs, and milestones.”
There is usually disagreement on the price
between project owner and freelancer. Usually
project owners do not know what price to offer to
have the project done with excellence within the
allocated time, and freelancer does not usually know
what price to offer in order to win the project in the
competition. What we propose is to calculate and
offer a realistic value to project owners based on
financial and social capital. In this way, the
company would be able to attract more clients with
upscale projects, because
1. Both the project owners and freelancers become
satisfied with the offered price.
2. There will be less and less negotiation in
regards to how much a project really worth or
take time.
3. Have the clients more segmented, therefore the
company can attract high value customers from
the competitors like upwork.
We measure project value based on different
variables including relevant projects sold value, and
the value of individuals who have completed those
relevant projects. At the same time, we measure
freelancer value, based on both financial and social
capital, i.e. how much in dollar was the value of the
relevant project sold, and what is the social capital
of that freelancer within the ego network.
We compute the network measures by creating a
social network topology of the projects and
individuals using a two-mode affiliation network.
Examples of affiliation networks that have been
studied in the past include e.g collaborations among
Broadway artists (Uzzi and Spiro, 2005) and co-
authorships (Newman, 2004), in which the groups to
which actors belong are respectively the groups of
actors appearing in a single show or the groups of
authors of a scientific article. Following the same
approach, we create an adjacency matrix.
We compute a measure of how well connected
the freelancer is in the network. There are several
approaches to computing the centrality of
individuals in networks. Different measures should
be more or less appropriate depending on the
assumptions made (Borgatti, 2005). Some centrality
measures account only for geodesic paths like
closeness and betweenness, whereas the eigenvector
measure does indicate that the traffic will not only
flow via shortest network path.
5 CONCLUSION
In this study we aim to calculate the financial and
social capital within freelancing platforms, and
specifically we focus on the website of
freelancer.com, and attempt to determine both the
offered project and freelancer values based on social
and financial capital within the affiliation network.
Social capital could be calculated via different
approaches including embedded resources or
network locations. At the group level, capital
represents some aggregation of valued resources
such as financial resources as well as social
connections. There are different measures associated
with network location of individuals within the
network including centrality, betweenness, size,
density and more. In order to estimate the intangible
asset, we have determined a set of explanatory
variables which influence on financial and social
capital. There are input variable selected such as
book/set value, market value, number of customers
(for each freelancer), and profit per freelancer or
project (for each project owner).
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Cohen, D. and Prusak, L. 2001. In Good Company.
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Putnam, R. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and
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Portes, A. 1998. Social Capital: Its origin and applications