Task search and labour supply in the platform economy

In this paper, we study the wage elasticity of labour supply of platform workers by exploiting uncertainty in task search. Using a survey of on-location and online platform workers in Europe, we show that wage reductions due to task search are inversely related to increases in labour supply and that changes in earnings net of task search are also inversely related to labour supply. Our estimated backwards-bending labour supply curves are valid for all platform workers and are robust to a number of misspecification and endogeneity issues.