If only people would put down Mieses and pick up Ronald Coase.
The "gig economy" relies on the jobs being simple and atomised. It relies on the quality being easy to collapse into a single number, and no tacit knowledge or ongoing relationship involved in the production. Managers keep assuming that these kind of internal transaction costs are unimportant, and that's how you get outsourcing disasters.
This is of course a major reason why looking at sharp growth and thinking it might be an accelerating trend doesn't always work.
"Gig economy" startups pick at the low hanging fruit first. Taxi drivers who are already hired by the journey are much more easily "decentralised" than people who are supposed to be the face of their company or undertake jobs with learning curves. There's plenty of scope for online services to improve the hiring of the latter, but it's still going to entail longer term contracts and often more regular working hours, and often better comparative performance metrics than a skewed star rating system.
The "gig economy" relies on the jobs being simple and atomised. It relies on the quality being easy to collapse into a single number, and no tacit knowledge or ongoing relationship involved in the production. Managers keep assuming that these kind of internal transaction costs are unimportant, and that's how you get outsourcing disasters.