Taming Platform Power: Taking Accountability into Account in the Management of Platforms
综述了平台问责制的两种视角（自下而上的集体行动与自上而下的制度变革），指出各自局限，并提出一个兼顾程序公平与分配公平的多边问责框架，旨在重新平衡平台所有者与生产者、用户等低权力主体之间的权力关系。
Research on multisided platforms has emphasized how platform owners accumulate significant power over other platform actors, such as producers and customers, arguing for the need to balance such power with accountability. We review two perspectives on platform accountability: (a) a bottom-up, emergent perspective that focuses on the collective action taken by lower-powered platform actors such as producers (e.g., gig workers, app developers) to enhance rule adequacy and push back against platform owners’ power; and (b) a top-down, institutional perspective that emphasizes preventing extractive opportunism and maintaining a level playing field among different platform actors by enabling legal, regulatory, and governance changes. The bottom-up perspective’s overarching focus is on procedural (rule-focused) fairness, while the top-down perspective’s focus is largely on distributive (outcome-focused) fairness. While both perspectives are important, they have limitations regarding platform accountability, especially given the power and informational asymmetries inherent among platform actors. Therefore, synthesizing across literatures, we provide a framework for platform accountability that accounts for both procedural and distributive fairness, and is based on a fundamental premise: multisided platforms require multisided accountability systems. Thus, our review proposes an approach for enforcing platform accountability that has the potential to rebalance the power between high-powered and low-powered platform actors.