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Worker Demographics and Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk: An Exploratory Analysis

Authors

Hara, K., Adams, A. Milland, M., Savage S., Hanrahan, B.V., Bigham J.P., and Callison-Burch, C.

Publication

CHI EA '19: Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2019, Paper No.: LBW1217 Pages 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312970

Abstract

Prior research reported that workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) are underpaid, earning about $2/h. But the prior research did not investigate the difference in wage due to worker characteristics (e.g., country of residence). We present the first data-driven analysis on wage gap on AMT. Using work log data and demographic data collected via online survey, we analyse the gap in wage due to different factors. We show that there is indeed wage gap; for example, workers in the U.S. earn $3.01/h while those in India earn $1.41/h on average.

Paper