Striving to Earn More: A Survey of Work Strategies and Tool Use Among Crowd Workers

Abstract

Earning money is a primary motivation for workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but earning a good wage is difficult because work that pays well is not easily identified and can be time-consuming to find. We explored the strategies that both low- and high-earning workers use to find and complete tasks via a survey of 360 workers. Nearly all workers surveyed had earning money as their primary goal, and workers used many of the same tools (browser extensions and scripts) and strategies in an attempt to earn more money, regardless of earning level. However, high-earning workers used more tools, were more involved in worker communities, and more heavily used batch completion strategies. A natural next step is to use automated systems to assist workers with finding and completing tasks. Workers found this idea interesting, but expressed concerns about impact on the quality of their work and whether using automated tools to support them would violate platform rules. We conclude with ideas for future work in supporting workers to earn more and design considerations for such tools.

The original sin of crowd work for human subjects research

“…Some other scholars may hold that they do value crowd workers’ self-fulfillment and welfare. For example, they unite crowd workers as a community and make their voice heard, concerns respected and skills improved (Irani and Silberman, 2013; Salehi et al , 2015; Kaplan et al , 2018). Still, they neglected that crowd workers’ individual needs for self-actualizations and development (Kaufmann et al , 2011) could not always be represented by scholars and translated into a collective vision or manifesto (e.g.…”

How Context Influences Cross-Device Task Acceptance in Crowd Work

“…There are many tools that can help workers find suitable tasks (Kaplan et al 2018;Williams et al 2019). For example, Turkopticon is one of the most widely adopted browser extensions that is used to evaluate and review requesters and HITs (Irani and Silberman 2013).…”

“…Absence of different work tools (e.g., browser extensions that filter tasks (Kaplan et al 2018)) can make other devices less desirable for crowd workers. Similarly, as observed in our results, complex image related tasks such as image bounding box are less desired on smartphones and smart speakers, due to limited screen-size and restricted interaction options.…”

Fair Work: Crowd Work Minimum Wage with One Line of Code

“…Early surveys reported multiple overlapping motivators (Ipeirotis 2010; Kaufmann, Schulze, and Veit 2011) including intrinsic enjoyment, and detailed variations in motivation across different geographic regions (Antin and Shaw 2012). However, more recent work has called out wages more visibly as a central matter of importance for workers (Kaplan et al 2018;Martin et al 2014;Gray and Suri 2019). New participant populations in the crowd work ecosystem immediately gravitate to extrinsic financial motivation as the primary reason to participate (Brewer, Morris, and Piper 2016).…”