(p. 233) John J. Horton surveys “The Condition of the Turking Class: Are Online Employers Fair and Honest?” Amazon Mechanical Turk is a “marketplace for work,” as explained at <https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome>. Employers post “Human Intelligence Tasks,” which can be tasks like writing keywords that accompany photos or writing bogus product reviews, and workers anywhere in the world can sign up to do them. Horton used Mechanical Turk to survey 200 respondents, who were paid 12 cents apiece for responding to a survey. Of the respondents, 111 were Americans, 58 from India, and the others from other countries. When asked what percentage of employers in their home country treat workers honestly and fairly, the average answer was 64 percent; in comparison, when asked what percentage of Mechanical Turk Requestors treated them (p. 234) fairly, the median answer was 69 percent.
Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 227-34.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
The published version of the article summarized by Taylor is:
Horton, John J. “The Condition of the Turking Class: Are Online Employers Fair and Honest?” Economics Letters 111, no. 1 (April 2011): 10-12.