Resumen de Amazon Mechanical Turk workers can provide consistent and economically meaningful data
David Johnson, John Barry Ryan
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online labor market that is being used increasingly often in the social sciences. This occurs despite significant questions regarding efficacy of the platform. In this article, we attempt to address some of these questions by exploring the consistency of the characteristics of individuals who participate in studies posted on AMT. The primary individuals analyzed in this study are subjects who participated in at least two of eleven experiments that were run on AMT between September of 2012 and January of 2018. We demonstrate subjects consistently report their age, gender, subjective willingness to take risk, and impulsiveness. Further, subjective willingness to take risk is found to be significantly correlated with decisions made in a simple lottery experiment with real stakes—even when the subjective risk measure is reported months, sometimes years, in the past. This suggests the quality of data obtained via AMT is not terribly harmed by the lack of control and low stakes.
