Winning the Gig in Freelance Online Marketplaces

One of the most striking recent developments in the professional services market has been the emergence of digital job platforms that connect freelancers to buyers. Drawing on language expectancy theory, this study demonstrates that it is the (un)conventional use of selling influencing tactics relative to buyer expectations that determines bidding success. An empirical text-mining study using more than 580,000 freelance bids demonstrates that excessive use of information exchange and ingratiation in bid formulations reduces bidding success, whereas for recommendations and inspirational appeals it increases the chance of landing the job. In contrast, the conventional use of promises increases bidding success. Further, both the level of freelancers’ experience and their ability to adapt the bids’ linguistic style to the buyers’ call-for-bids increases the range of normative bandwidth such that any violation in SIT use improves the chances of winning the bid.