In this article we address the question of how to measure the size and characteristics of the platform economy. We propose a~different, to sample surveys, approach based on smartphone data, which are passively collected through programmatic systems as part of online marketing. In particular, in our study we focus on two types of services: food delivery (Bolt Courier, Takeaway, Glover, Wolt and transport services (Bolt Driver, Free Now, iTaxi and Uber). Our results show that the platform economy in Poland is growing. In particular, with respect to food delivery and transportation services performed by means of applications, we observed a growing trend between January 2018 and December 2020. Taking into account the demographic structure of apps users, our results confirm findings from past studies: the majority of platform workers are young men but the age structure of app users is different for each of the two categories of services. Another surprising finding is that foreigners do not account for the majority of gig workers in Poland. When the number of platform workers is compared with corresponding working populations, the estimated share of active app users accounts for about 0.5-2% of working populations in 9 largest Polish cities.
翻译:在本篇文章中,我们讨论了如何衡量平台经济的规模和特点的问题。我们建议对基于智能电话数据的抽样调查采取不同的做法,这种调查是作为在线营销的一部分,通过程序系统被动收集的,特别是,在我们的研究中,我们侧重于两类服务:食品供应(Bolt Courier、Takeaway、Glover、Wolt和运输服务(Bolt Driver、Free Now、iTexi和Uber),我们的结果显示波兰的平台经济正在增长。特别是,在以应用手段提供食品和运输服务方面,我们观察到2018年1月至2020年12月期间出现了增长的趋势。考虑到应用程序用户的人口结构,我们的结果证实了过去研究的结果:平台工人大多数是年轻男子,但两种服务类别中每个类别的应用程序用户的年龄结构不同。另一个令人惊讶的调查结果是,在波兰,外籍人并不占到工作工人的大多数。在比较平台工人人数时,在波兰9个最大的城市,估计活跃的用户占工作人口的0.5-2 %。