# Platform Economy and Techno-Regulation--Experimenting with Reputation and Nudge
## 4 Implementing a Techno-Regulation Strategy for Digital Labour Platforms  
In this section, we present ongoing research aimed at exploring IT solutions to implement techno-regulatory policies in the DLPs sector. The idea is to experiment with new ways to support, on the technological level, legal policies in the field of gig-economy. The case study presented in the following sections is rooted in a recent paper [34] speculating about regulatory solutions to achieve higher levels of economic security and social protection for crowd workers and people offering \"work on demand via apps\" [24]. To this end, the proposal (to which reference is made for more details) comes up with a \"hybrid\" strategy integrating different regulatory approaches. On the one hand, as we will see in Section 4.2, it tries to exploit the power of nudges--more precisely reputational ones--currently at the heart of _Behavioral Law and Economics_ research. At the same time, far from interpreting nudge as a vehicle for deregulation [35], it aims to introduce a tighter public scrutiny over the digital labor market so as to enable a more effective control over the compliance with labor law and contracts. In line with the techno-regulation paradigm, authors try to integrate traditional legal safeguards and technological aids going towards the paradigm that [PERSON] defines as _\"legal protection by design\"_[11]. The attempt ends up in what is called _\"Integrated Crowdwork System\"_ (hereinafter _ISC_), a technological and regulatory public architecture supporting the above mentioned goals. Legal solutions imagined--we dwell on them just to give an overview of the scenario the case study is placed in--aim, first of all, to favor the intervention of public administrations (national level authority in the proposal) in the crowd work market. Measures envisaged in this vein are of two types--a preemptive authorization mechanism of the DLPs to operate on the market and the mandatory registration in a public record of all the individuals interested in working with DLPs and in being recognized as virtual crowd workers. Other measures are designed for the active protection of workers--tracking and the validity for social security/pension purposes of the work activities carried out in favor of different DLPs; minimum wages; allowances for inactivity periods. From the technological point of view, the implementation of the ISC should be supported by an integrated architecture conceived as a public intermediate layer, a \"trust intermediary\" [36] for the interactions between all the subjects in various ways involved in the market dynamics of the digital work: public administrations (e.g., ministries, labor inspectorates, social security institutions), crowd workers; DLPs; other actors (e.g., labor and industrial associations, potential customers and crowd workers, ordinary citizens). In general terms, the infrastructure should support the following functions: (i) recording of the labor and financial relations between DLPs and crowd workers; (ii) collecting and exposing to the Public Administrations all data stemming from the interactions between workers and platforms; (iii) guarantee certainty and transparency in transactions; (iv) allowing the stipulation of smart contracts; (v) providing the worker with the possibility to store and have at hand all the financial and social security information of his occasional works; (vi) implementing reputation mechanisms to protect crowd workers. To implement these functions, authors foresee an architecture based on two modules (see Figure 3). The _Social Security and Contracts Module_ should exploit blockchain and smart contracts technology to enable and keep track of any interaction taking place in the digital labor market.