# Platform Economy and Techno-Regulation--Experimenting with Reputation and Nudge
## 4 Implementing a Techno-Regulation Strategy for Digital Labour Platforms
### A Case Study: Techno-Regulation and Reputational Nudge  
Drawing on the architecture described above, we started a case study dealing with the development of one of the ISC's components. We focused, in this vein, on the _Reputation/Transparency Module_ that, for understandable reasons, can be more easily developed and tested. The implementation of a review platform, actually, can be tackled with reasonable technical effort and without necessarily involving all the actors of the architecture. On the other hand, the reputation is capable of playing a significant role in influencing the behavior of subjects operating in the digital market.  
As resulting from a literature dating back to the 2000s and despite their undeniable limitations (see, among the others, References [37; 38; 39] reputation mechanisms can play a significant role in tackling problems related to trust and contracts' compliance, especially in contexts where transactions take place between people/partners unfamiliar and at a distance [40]. They seems to be a valuable support to integrate the more established institutions for building trust (such as formal contracts) in electronic environments where such contractual guarantees cannot be efficiently enforced. It is useful to note that reputational systems, usually concerning sellers [41; 42] rather than buyers [43], are indeed found to achieve important global effects, that is, keeping prices lower (for a review, see Reference [44]). The potential applications of online reputation mechanisms go beyond the relatively narrow domain of trust building in electronic marketplaces. The appeal of reputation mechanisms is that, when they work, they facilitate cooperation without the need for costly enforcement institutions. They have, therefore, the potential of providing more economically efficient outcomes in a wide range of moral hazard settings where societies currently rely on the threat of litigation in order to induce cooperation.  
Reputation, on the other hand, is an interesting topic also because it represents one of the frontiers in the future developments of technoregulation, identified up to now above all with hard-coded, (almost) unavoidable legal rules that are enabled, or inhibited, through the technology. As highlighted in Reference [12], by focusing exclusively on regulation through the use of technologies, this domain \"_excludes other, \"_softer_\", _less \"legal\" forms of influencing [...] the fact that technologies may also be used to persuade, or to nudge, for example, is left un(der)addressed.\"_ There are indeed scholars in the field of _Law & Technology_ that mention softer forms of (intentional) technological influencing [13; 20; 45] but too often nudging, and other forms of more gentle persuasion, largely falls outside the scope of the  
Figure 3: Integrated Crowdwork System: infrastructure. Adapted from [24].  
current debate on techno-regulation. Yet, in recent years, nudge--_\"any small feature of the environment that attracts people's attention and alters their behavior but does so in a way that does not compel\"_[46]--has become an inspiring reference point in the current debate about the frontiers of policy design (see, among the others, Reference [47]).  
In the light of the above we decided to explore the integration of techno-regulatory tools with nudge strategies. We focused, in particular, on reputation mechanisms that have proven to be a powerful ally in triggering norm compliance and cooperation in digital environments [48; 49; 50]. As a matter of fact, recent history of DLPs (see, for instance, the case of _Turkopticon_[51]), which shows how the assignment of ratings can push platforms to modify their behavior to avoid drawbacks deriving from bad reputation.