Working Paper

How Consumer Empathy Drives Platform Success

Markus Giesler, Ela Veresiu, and Ashlee Humphreys

Jan 7, 2019

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Brings recent advances in the sociology of emotions to bear on an ethnography of Uber’s ride-hailing market; identifies a mythology of empathetic platforms that ideologically contains consumer anxieties inherent to platform markets by promulgating powerful mythic contrasts between a regular market’s apathetic consumers and platform consumers’ ability to compassionately relate to another market actor’s situation; shows how Uber’s marketing team has leveraged this mythology over time to contain three types of consumer risks (physical, financial, and social).

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