Increasing Wages with Strategies from High Earning Workers

Crowd markets have traditionally limited workers by not provid-ing transparency information concerning which tasks pay fairlyor which requesters are unreliable. Researchers believe that a keyreason why crowd workers earn low wages is due to this lack oftransparency. As a result, tools have been developed to providemore transparency within crowd markets to help workers. How-ever, while most workers use these tools, they still earn less thanminimum wage. We argue that the missing element is guidance onhow to use transparency information. In this paper, we explore hownovice workers can improve their earnings by following the trans-parency criteria of Super Turkers, i.e., crowd workers who earnhigher salaries on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). We believethat Super Turkers have developed effective processes for usingtransparency information. Therefore, by having novices follow aSuper Turker criteria (one that is simple and popular among SuperTurkers), we can help novices increase their wages. For this purpose,we:(i)conducted a survey and data analysis to computationallyidentify a simple yet common criteria that Super Turkers use forhandling transparency tools;(ii)deployed a two-week field experi-ment with novices who followed this Super Turker criteria to findbetter work on MTurk. Novices in our study viewed over 25,000tasks by 1,394 requesters. We found that novices who utilized thisSuper Turkers’ criteria earned better wages than other novices. Ourresults highlight that tool development to support crowd workersshould be paired with educational opportunities that teach work-ers how to effectively use the tools and their related metrics (e.g.,transparency values). We finish with design recommendations forempowering crowd workers to earn higher salaries.

Research paper

Becoming the Super Turker: Increasing Wages via a Strategy from High Earning Workers
Saiph Savage, Chun-Wei Chiang, Susumu Saito, Carlos Toxtli, Jeffrey Bigham,
WWW: The Web Conference 2020
You can download the research paper from this link.

Code: Web Plugin for Collecting Data about Workers’ Wages.

We developed a Google Chrome extension to track and study workers’ wages and work practices. You can download the code for this chrome extensuion on this: link

You will also need to deploy a server to collect and process the data You can find the code of the server side code on this link

Data: Workers’ Wages and Work Practices.

Through our research we collected data related to workers’ wages and work practices. We are sharing data related to the type of tasks crowd workers are doing, how much time it takes them to complete those tasks, and how much workers are paid to do those tasks (HIT pricing). Please complete this form, sign it and send it to the email addresses indicated in the form. We will send you a temporary link to your email with an anonymized version of the dataset.

Citation

Access the BibTeX

Savage, Saiph, Chun Wei Chiang, Susumu Saito, Carlos Toxtli, and Jeffrey Bigham. “Becoming the Super Turker: Increasing Wages via a Strategy from High Earning Workers.” In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020, pp. 1241-1252. 2020.