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Forced volatility: earnings and incentives for gig work in quick commerce — arXiv:2609.13178

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13178
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-15T23:46:22.826Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 00592afb49245fdaaf03b94baf96a2fcf466157df312af6595b906645b368982
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_fa18add582aa

How to cite

Forced volatility: earnings and incentives for gig work in quick commerce — arXiv:2609.13178 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13178 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_fa18add582aa (Metraipolis archive dc_fa18add582aa, sha256 00592afb49245fdaaf03b94baf96a2fcf466157df312af6595b906645b368982)

BibTeX

@misc{dcfa18add582aa,
  title = {Forced volatility: earnings and incentives for gig work in quick commerce — arXiv:2609.13178},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13178},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_fa18add582aa; sha256 00592afb49245fdaaf03b94baf96a2fcf466157df312af6595b906645b368982},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13178. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

India's quick commerce sector has grown explosively, with platforms such as Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, and others delivering groceries and daily essentials through dense networks of neighbourhood dark stores. This growth has made the sector a major catalyst for India's gig economy, but its reliance on a large, flexible delivery workforce raises pressing concerns about wages, working conditions, and social security. These platforms use opaque algorithms to set pay, allocate tasks, and evaluate performance, with earnings varying by factors such as weather and worker availability. The resulting information asymmetry leaves workers unable to reconstruct how their pay is determined or how it fluctuates over time and place. We present GigSaathi, a pilot intervention designed to address this asymmetry; a chatbot that enables delivery workers to systematically collect earnings screenshots, which are processed into time series data on individual wages. We supplement this with incentive data collected from Blinkit stores in New Delhi. Our analysis reveals substantial variability in base pay, incentives, working hours, and distance travelled, with a large share of earnings contingent on undisclosed variables; Blinkit, the sector's largest firm, guarantees no minimum base pay per kilometre. We find little to no correlation between earnings and time spent per order, indicating that workers are not compensated proportionately for delivery time, and show that incentives function as a tool of labour control orders with higher per order earnings carry a lower incentive share. Incentives average roughly a quarter of weekly earnings but vary widely. These findings add to mounting evidence that quick commerce gig work in India is precarious, with wages governed by opaque algorithms that push workers into chasing unknown incentives without any guarantee of higher pay.

Tema degli esploratori: governance digitale e beni comuni (retro-catalogo arXiv: annunci del 2026-09-15 in cs.CY).
Categorie arXiv: Computers and Society (cs.CY).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13178 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-15T23:17:38.143Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/catchup/cs.CY/2026-09-15?abs=True (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).