 Motivating crowdworkers with nonmonetary incentives and payment framing—Evidence from a large-scale experiment✰Maja Adena, Patrycja Janowska-Widomska and Julian Harke EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2026, vol. 123, No 102602, 12 pages Abstract: An increasing number of individuals worldwide are participating in crowdwork and telework. They often perform tasks such as AI training and content moderation. While these tasks are typically conducted in large quantities and often involve routine elements, their nature makes them inherently demanding. They require high levels of engagement or creativity and produce outputs of subjective quality that are difficult to measure. In a preregistered field experiment involving over 5500 crowdworkers, we examined the impact of automated recognition and work-appreciation phrases and payment framing on motivation, performance, and job satisfaction. The results indicate that recognition-automated phrases: Great work! You did a good job! Nice job! Well done!-positively influences subjective job satisfaction, and that loss-framed payment is somewhat more effective than gain framing. Overall, the treatments have little effect on objective and subjective performance and motivation. Keywords: Crowdworkers; Complex tasks; Routine; Automated motivation; Nonmonetary incentives; Recognition and appreciation; Loss and gain framework; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:343491 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2026.102602 Access Statistics for this article More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
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