Digital Platforms as Social Evaluation Intermediaries

Abstract Digital platforms have become increasingly influential in shaping social evaluations. This chapter highlights how greater visibility of heterogeneous stakeholder judgements, combined with powershifts, heightened accountability pressures, and declining information accuracy, has intensified the challenges of managing social evaluations, including reputation, legitimacy, trust, stigma, and social disapproval. These issues are discussed from three distinct perspectives that conceptualise digital platforms as: (a) infrastructure for social evaluation systems, (b) forums for social evaluation communities, and (c) agentic platform technologies. By contrasting these perspectives, this chapter identifies major debates and unresolved questions that lay the groundwork for a future research agenda.