Ayaj Rana

Publication(s)

• Iyer, D. K., Rana, A., & Litwin, A. S. (2026). "Technology Makers as De Facto Work Designers in American Healthcare." Work and Occupations. In Press. Link

Working Papers 

• Dissertation Paper I: Occupational Evaluability and Power Asymmetry. This paper asks how a professional experiences power in the exchange with clients on the platform. Existing research suggests that the professional submits to the client’s power, since each client’s evaluation feeds an accumulated rating that determines the professional’s future opportunities on the platform. In contrast to this structural view of professional–client power asymmetry on the platform, I show that who holds power over whom depends on the nature of the work itself, namely its outside evaluability—the extent to which an outsider to the profession can evaluate the work. Where the work admits outside evaluation, the client can judge the work independently, without needing the professional’s interpretation. As such, the professional holds little power over the client in commanding what counts as acceptable performance and thus remains accommodative rather than resistive to client demands in order to protect her accumulated rating, since in a competitive market even a small decline in the rating can cost her future work. The professional thus experiences the rating as a leash. Where the work resists outside evaluation, the same rating becomes a license, since a client who cannot judge the work without the professional’s interpretation must defer to the expertise the rating certifies. A paired qualitative comparison of two occupations at opposite ends of this property—software development with high outside evaluability and digital sales with low—identifies the mechanism of leash or license. Survey evidence then generalizes the mechanism across the full range of platform-hosted occupations, showing that the rating’s disciplining force weakens with lower outside evaluability of the work. The paper extends research on algorithmic control, power-dependence, and reactivity to public evaluation, showing that one property of the work makes the rating’s force conditional, sets both parties’ dependence, and alters the reactivity of the evaluated. 

• Dissertation Paper II: Professional Identity Through Client Interaction. This paper examines how professionals sustain a valued identity under the platform’s algorithmic mediation. Professionals construct who they are through identity work carried out in interaction with the audiences of their work, such as clients. Yet to sell professional labor like a commodity, platforms depersonalize freelancers’ client exchange into fee-bearing transactions, stripping away the conditions for such interaction. Identity theory predicts that professionals facing such identity strains will cultivate personalized holding environments with alternative audiences such as peers, or will leave the platform altogether through role transition or role exit. Freelancers, however, need not do any of these, because the platform’s digital intermediary structure lets them disintermediate it, engaging trusted clients off the platform while continuing to work with other clients on it. Platforms prohibit disintermediation and punish detected violations with permanent suspension, since the practice threatens their transaction-fee business model, and platform-strategy research accordingly explains it as marketplace leakage. Yet why would freelancers who depend on the platform for their income risk suspension to save a fee worth a tiny fraction of what suspension would forfeit? Drawing on interviews and online community observations, I show that freelancers disintermediate not only to save the fee but also to restore the client interaction in ways that let them sustain a professional identity that is coherent, relational, agentic, and provisional. I theorize this process of sustaining identity as identity re-siting, whereby freelancers relocate the client work that anchors their identity off the platform while continuing work of little identity significance on it.

• Dissertation Paper III: Reciprocity, Reputation, and the Locus of Exchange. This paper asks why some freelancers disintermediate more than others and shows that those more likely to disintermediate are the platform’s most reputable performers, the ones who are most invested in the platform and least replaceable. Two theories predict the opposite of each other here. Resource dependence theory treats reputation as the platform’s property, since a reputation built on the platform is worthless off it, so the most reputable freelancers have the most to lose and should keep their work on the platform. By contrast, human capital theory treats the same reputation as portable—a record of skill and client trust the freelancer carries with her—so the most reputable freelancers should be able to disintermediate most freely. The interviews show that neither theory holds on its own. Whether a freelancer keeps her clients on the platform or moves them off depends on the extent to which the platform has kept the promises that drew her to its marketplace in the first place. Put differently, it is the balance of the freelancer–platform exchange that decides which theory holds. I identify four promises this exchange rests on—meritocratic access to work, fair resolution of disputes, transparent governance, and support for career growth—each named in freelancers’ narratives and confirmed against the platform’s own marketing. Survey evidence then shows that the most reputable freelancers disintermediate as they come to see these promises as unmet, experiencing a deficit in the inducements they receive in exchange for their contributions to the platform. The paper extends psychological contract theory from the conventional employment dyad to the contemporary triadic market-mediated work arrangement. 

Select Pre-Ph.D. Publications

• Kamal, M., & Rana, A. (2019). "Do Internal and International Remittances Affect Households’ Expenditure and Asset Accumulation Differently? Evidence from Bangladesh." The Journal of Developing Areas, 53(2), 139–153. Link

• Rana, A., & Kamal, M. (2018). "Does Clientelism Affect Income Inequality? Evidence from Panel Data." Journal of Income Distribution, 27(1), 1–24. Link

• Kamal, M., Rana, A., & Wahid, A. (2018). "Economic Reform and Corruption: Evidence from Panel Data." Australian Economic Papers, 57(1), 92–106. Link

• Rana, A., & Wahid, A. (2017). "Fiscal Deficit and Economic Growth in Bangladesh: A Time-Series Analysis." The American Economist, 62(1), 31–42. Link