Decentralized evaluation systems of sharing-economy platforms are mostly depicted either as apparatuses of control that instantiate specific forms of power, or as information products that mitigate situations of information asymmetry. In this study, we take neo-institutional lenses and coupled them with practice-based insights to look at those taken-for-granted elements of sharing-economy platforms’ infrastructure. This allows us to explore whether and how platform-owners can strategically direct their users’ use of this decentralized evaluation system, whereas they are precisely pressured by their environment to incorporate such a feature on the infrastructure they provide to their users. Our qualitative study run on 21 sharing-economy market-organizations in France suggests that platform-owners succeed to manipulate the internal value of the valuation device, either by exerting an episodic power over an offline network, or by manipulating the value of evaluations in the commensurability of users’ demands or requests. Our results thus expand the role of sharing-economy platform-owners and enrich the understanding of competition between digital marketplaces, by stressing the key role of the value of valuation devices.
