Governança pela reputação na contratação intermediada por plataformas

Abstract

Contractual governance is an interdisciplinary research methodology that contains the whole set of influences that act on the contract. It comprehends different levels of analysis, especially an internal (governance through contract) and an external (governance of contract) dimensions, in addition to encompassing both ethical principles and normative standards recognized or accepted by the stakeholder's community, such as compliance mechanisms, which act as checks and balances in order to ensure a democratic management in contractual networks. Reputation systems are contractual governance instruments that act to simultaneously build trust and punish market agents. They are a sort of social capital that operates as a non-legal sanction, offering non-economic guarantees for contractual non-performance. In platform-mediated contracting, reputation systems equipped with artificial intelligence capable of making autonomous decisions translate the information encompassed in users' evaluations into a specific code for a given supplier's reputation. Governance through reputation, in platform-mediated contracting, exhibits two basic functions, which interact with one another in order to produce supra-contractual effects: the informational function and the disciplinary function. Being the reputation at the center of this contracting model, as a systematic cause, it falls over the platform the duty to adopt the necessary governance safeguards to ensure that the reputational information made available to users is accurate, correct and adequate, so that arbitrary, discriminatory or disproportionate sanctions are not applied to suppliers. The governance of reputation systems aims to avoid risks and remedy damages that may be caused to the people involved in platform-mediated contracting, especially in the face of automated decision-making. In this role, governance rules and good practices provide operability and concreteness to the legal norm, safeguarding the authenticity and precision of reputational information, ensuring adequate means to challenge those decisions and proposing concrete governance measures that prevent biases, arbitrariness and discrimination against suppliers and users, in addition to avoiding excessively intrusive profiling, preserving the integrity of reviews and ratings and impeding providers exclusion in perpetuity.