The judicial determination of employment relationships in internet platform work presents a common challenge for courts worldwide. An examination of relevant judicial decisions reveals that both rulings affirming and denying the existence of an employment relationship between platform operators and workers have uniformly applied the hierarchical supervision method. This approach primarily examines the operator’ s labor management and economic control over the worker, yet it systematically overlooks the flexibility inherent in the worker’s role within the sharing economy. Given that the sharing economy has fundamentally altered traditional production structures, worker flexibility has emerged as a critical factor in determining employment relationships in the platform context. This new consideration must be integrated into a novel analytical framework: the dominance-based determination method. Worker flexibility is manifested through the worker’s capacity to accept or reject, via expressions of intent, the operator’ s labor management and economic control. Accordingly, the dominance-based determination method comprises two essential dimensions: (1) the internet platform operator exercises labor management and economic control over the worker; and (2) the worker, through expressions of intent, accepts such management and control. Only when both conditions are concurrently satisfied may an employment relationship between the internet platform operator and the worker be established; otherwise, the existence of such a relationship cannot be affirmed.