# Platform Economy and Techno-Regulation--Experimenting with Reputation and Nudge
## 1 Introduction  
Over the last decades, the spread of information and communication technologies has triggered a pervasive change at all levels of human society. In an era in which information communication technologies (ICT) shape economies and even institutions [1], new regulatory mechanisms are needed to order a \"hybrid\" reality in which technologies and social activities melt in an inextricable whole. This scenario raises new challenges to legal systems and public authorities--traditional regulations and policies often look unsuitable to safeguard rights in digital settings. As witnessed by the evolution of privacy enhancing technologies [2; 3; 4], legal safeguards are increasingly bound to be conceived and developed together with the technological ones.  
The issue can be traced back to \"techno-regulation,\" an emerging regulatory paradigm that can be in the first place defined as \"_the effectuation of norms through technical means at various levels such as rule-making, implementation, monitoring and enforcement_\" [5]. Taking hold in all the scenarios where social and economic interactions are mediated by ICT, techno-regulation confronts us with a perspective in which technology is at once subject to, and an active part of, the regulatory process. Due to this hybrid nature, techno-regulation raises issues on the legal level and, at the same time, presents challenges for both computer science and computational legal research. The idea of implementing normative strategies through digital technologies, indeed, calls not only for adequate regulatory frames but also for IT solutions that properly support legal safeguards.  
This work presents an ongoing project facing the development of techno-regulatory solutions that focuses, in particular, on the gig economy scenario. Stemming from a collaboration between computational legal scholars and computer scientists that draws also from two university classes \"_Computational Intelligence and Techno-regulation: paradigms, methods, tools_\", a Ph.D. course taught at Department of Computer Science of the University of Salerno, and \"_Law and computational social science_\", a class taught at the Department of Law, Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods of the University of Sannio--the initiative explores the possibility of strengthening existing labor law safeguards for Digital Labor Platforms (hereinafter DLPs) workers by integrating legal and technological remedies. The analysis proposed here focuses on the technological component of a broader techno-regulative strategy currently under development, which will require the active involvement of DLPs and Public Administration. Specifically, we introduce _GigAdvisor_, a cross-platform web application that has a twofold goal: (i) to increase transparency in the DLPs' market and (ii) to exploit reputational mechanisms to induce fairer practices among the DLP market's operators. IT can indeed have a profound impact in promoting trust and cooperation among economic agents especially by means of online communities, enabling the creation of low cost reputation networks of global reach.  
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces the techno-regulation paradigm, sketching its evolution from its inception in the early 2000s to the present day. Section 3 describes the scenario of our research, that is, the gig and sharing economy, one of the most challenging fields for the development of techno-regulation solutions. Section 4 is devoted to the presentation of our case study: after a brief outline of a techno-regulation project's architecture applied to DLPs, it focuses on _GigAdvisor_, the underlying vision inspiring it and the technological solutions adopted for that purpose. Section 5 concludes with some considerations about both the project's future steps and challenges.