The war of the worlds: mutual evaluation systems and order building in market-organizations of the platform-economy

The platform-economy is taking economic prominence and certain market-organizations succeed to gather millions of members (who are strangers to one another). The development of those entities is explained by their implementation of mutual evaluation systems on their digital infrastructure, the later providing users with security mechanisms. In the present article we adopt another perspective and investigate the role mutual evaluation systems play in the organizing process at stake in those particular configurations. A large literature already explores the organizational role of evaluation systems both within and outside traditional organizational borders: they mostly discipline behaviors toward shared conceptions about what is of worth or constitute vehicles to build those shared common orders. But what happens in the very context constituted by off-line transactions of the platform-economy? Which conceptions of worth are to prevail? By conducting a case-study on the French carpooling platform BlaBlaCar, we extant literature and uncover the process of order building at stake in those market-organizations. We pinpoint that effective evaluation system uses (or rejections of use) explain the order that finally prevails on the platform, the latter being thus the outcome of a complex interplay between both users' and organizers' decisions.