Monopsony in Online Labor Markets

Arindrajit Dube, Jeff Jacobs, Suresh Naidu and Siddharth Suri

No 24416, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: On-demand labor platforms make up a large part of the “gig economy.” We quantify the extent of monopsony power in one of the largest on-demand labor platforms, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), by measuring the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer) using both observational and experimental variation in wages. We isolate plausibly exogenous variation in rewards using a double-machine-learning estimator applied to a large dataset of scraped MTurk tasks. We also re-analyze data from 5 MTurk experiments that randomized payments to obtain corresponding experimental estimates. Both approaches yield uniformly low labor supply elasticities, around 0.1, with little heterogeneity.

JEL-codes: J01 J42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-exp, nep-lma, nep-mkt and nep-pay
Note: LS
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (53)

Published as Arindrajit Dube & Jeff Jacobs & Suresh Naidu & Siddharth Suri, 2020. "Monopsony in Online Labor Markets," American Economic Review: Insights, vol 2(1), pages 33-46.

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Journal Article: Monopsony in Online Labor Markets (2020)
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