A comparative study of algorithmic management on delivery platforms: dispatch, ratings and incentive pay as they operate in practice, the workarounds riders build back, and the regulatory fight now under way in China, Australia and the EU over what an algorithm gets to decide about a worker's day.
Photo: Javier Perez Montes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What you will do
Read algorithmic management closely enough to argue about it. Weeks 1–6 take a delivery platform apart mechanism by mechanism — ETAs, ratings, incentive pay, worker classification — anchored in Uber, alongside a close second case, the Renwu magazine reporting on China's food-delivery riders that gave this course its title, and the workarounds riders actually use. Weeks 7–12 put those mechanisms in front of three regulators — China, Australia, the EU — and ask what each one decides an algorithm is allowed to do to a worker's day. You walk out having designed and defended one piece of a dispatch system yourself.
Who it is for
Anyone willing to read a platform's own engineering writeup as closely as a regulatory determination, and treat neither as the last word. No law or computer-science background assumed — bring the willingness to check a claim against a second source rather than repeat it.