Platform workers can typically not take their ratings from one platform to another. This creates lock-in as building up reputation anew can come at prohibitively high cost. A system of portable reputation may mitigate this problem but poses several new challenges and questions. This study reports the results of an online experiment among 180 actual clients of five gig economy platforms to disentangle the importance of two dimensions of worker reputation: (1) contextual fit (i.e., the ratings’ origin from the same or another platform) and (2) contentual fit (i.e., the ratings’ origin from the same or a different job type). By and large, previous work has demonstrated the potential of imported ratings for trust-building but usually confounded these two dimensions. Our results provide a more nuanced picture and suggest that there exist two important boundary conditions for reputation portability: While imported ratings can have an effect on trust, they may only do so for matching job types and in the absence of within-platform ratings.

平台工作人员通常无法将他们的评级从一个平台转移到另一个平台。这就造成了锁定，因为重新建立声誉可能会付出高昂的成本。可移植声誉系统可能会缓解这个问题，但也会带来一些新的挑战和问题。本研究报告了在五个零工经济平台的 180 名实际客户中进行的在线实验结果，旨在理清工人声誉两个维度的重要性：(1) 情境契合度（即评级源自同一或另一个平台）和（ 2) 内容匹配（即，评级源自相同或不同的工作类型）。总的来说，之前的工作已经证明了进口评级在建立信任方面的潜力，但通常混淆了这两个维度。