Konferenzbeitrag

Motivation and Incentives in an Online Labor Market

An increasing number of workers participate in online labor markets. In contrast to traditional employment relationships within firms, the interaction between online workers and their employers are short and impersonal, which makes motivating online workers more challenging. We present results from two large-scale real-effort experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk investigating the effects of monetary and non-monetary motivational instruments. In the first experiment, we study the effects of performance pay and simple upfront messages (praise or reference points) on performance. The second experiment concentrates on the effects of communication techniques used by charismatic leaders. Performance pay increases output significantly. Sending simple messages, however, can have a significantly negative effect on output. The results from the second experiment show that charismatic communication techniques can also backfire when only a subset of them is used, whereas using a broad set including quantitative goals increases output significantly. Neither intervention had any effect on the quality of work.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2020: Gender Economics

Classification
Wirtschaft
Field Experiments
Personnel Economics: Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects
Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
Subject
Online Labor Market
Performance Pay
Motivation
Charismatic Leadership

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Fest, Sebastian
Kvaloy, Ola
Nieken, Petra
Schöttner, Anja
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
(where)
Kiel, Hamburg
(when)
2020

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Konferenzbeitrag

Associated

  • Fest, Sebastian
  • Kvaloy, Ola
  • Nieken, Petra
  • Schöttner, Anja
  • ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Time of origin

  • 2020

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