Factors that influence the choice of freelance as a form of self-employment

The number of freelancers in Russia is increasing annually. For this social group internal social identity is very important, but the group inside is heterogeneous. Particularly it can be divided into two subgroups. One of the freelancers’ subgroups is self-organised and executes the work qualitatively, when the other subgroup requires organization from the employer and the results comes more like a fact of done work, not its quality. In spite of the evident difference between these subgroups their distinguishing in practice is problematical. In fact this situation turns into the market for lemons, where the freelancers of the first subgroup are forced to give the signals of quality. In order to distinguish the two subgroups the author has analyzed three quality signals: the period of registration at freelance labour exchange, presence of the personal web-site or the web-site of the union of same profile specialists, the quantity of points at www.free-lance.ru. The results of the research are presented in this article.