Motivation and Incentives in an Online Labor Market

Sebastian Fest, Ola Kvaløy, Petra Nieken and Anja Schöttner

VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Online Labor Market; Performance Pay; Motivation; Charismatic Leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-ict
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Related works:
Working Paper: Motivation and incentives in an online labor market (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc20:224586

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