Deterring Unethical Behavior in Online Labor Markets

Brink, William D.; Eaton, Tim V.; Grenier, Jonathan H.; Reffett, Andrew

doi:10.1007/s10551-017-3570-y

Cited by 27 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Nevertheless, there are concerns that the unique characteristics of online labor markets increase the potential for dishonest and unethical behavior. The workforce is anonymous and transient [ 17 ] and is typically unmonitored [ 18 ]. Because workers operate remotely in uncontrolled settings, online work can weaken social ties with employers [ 19 ] and has the potential for distractions such as cell phones [ 20 ] and multi-tasking [ 21 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do truth-telling oaths improve honesty in crowd-working?

et al. 2021

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This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first confirm that a substantial majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate that lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. Even in this online, purely anonymous environment, the oath significantly reduced the percent of subjects telling “big” lies (by roughly 27%), but did not affect shirking. We also explore whether a truth-telling oath can be used as a screening device if implemented after decisions have been made. Conditional on flipping response, MTurk shirkers and workers who lied were significantly less likely to agree to an ex-post honesty oath. Our results suggest oaths may help elicit more truthful behavior, even in online crowd-sourced environments.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do truth-telling oaths improve honesty in crowd-working?

et al. 2021

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“…In addition, researchers should decide a priori what criteria (if any) will be used to refuse payment to MTurkers (Fieseler, Bucher, & Hoffmann, 2017; Gleibs, 2017), and the schedule of payment. Moreover, codes of conduct, monitoring procedures, and penalties for fraudulent or untruthful reporting should be formulated as levying economic penalties for deceitful behavior can affect MTurkers’ honesty (Brink, Eaton, Grenier, & Reffett, 2019). These norms should be made explicit and shared with participants in the consent form.…”

Section: Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

MTurk Research: Review and Recommendations

Aguinis

Villamor

Ramani

2020

Journal of Management

637

420

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The use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) in management research has increased over 2,117% in recent years, from 6 papers in 2012 to 133 in 2019. Among scholars, though, there is a mixture of excitement about the practical and logistical benefits of using MTurk and skepticism about the validity of the data. Given that the practice is rapidly increasing but scholarly opinions diverge, the Journal of Management commissioned this review and consideration of best practices. We hope the recommendations provided here will serve as a catalyst for more robust, reproducible, and trustworthy MTurk-based research in management and related fields.

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“…Additionally, there is ample evidence that contestants systematically differ in the degree to which they exert unethical behavior: males appear to be more likely than females to behave unethically in various environments and situations. Davis et al (1992) and Fang et al (2013) report that males are more prone to engage in academic misconduct than females, whereas a similar gender gap is found regarding the intention or actual usage of doping in sports (Papadopoulos et al, 2006), dishonest reporting in online labor markets (Brink et al, 2017), or in unethical business behavior (Betz et al, 1989). Experimental evidence that males are more likely to lie to secure a monetary benefit is reported by Dreber and Johannesson (2008) for individuals, by Muehlheusser et al (2015) for teams, and by Conrads et al (2014) in a competitive setting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Gender differences in sabotage: the role of uncertainty and beliefs

Dato

Nieken

2019

Exp Econ

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We study gender differences in relation to performance and sabotage in competitions. While we find no systematic gender differences in performance in the real effort task, we observe a strong gender gap in sabotage choices in our experiment. This gap is rooted in the uncertainty about the opponent's sabotage: in the absence of information about the opponent's sabotage choice, males expect to suffer from sabotage to a higher degree than females and choose higher sabotage levels themselves. If beliefs are exogenously aligned by implementing sabotage via strategy method, the gender gap in sabotage choices disappears. Moreover, providing a noisy signal about the sabotage level from which subjects might suffer leads to an endogenous alignment of beliefs and eliminates the gender gap in sabotage. JEL-Codes: J160, M120, C910.

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Deterring Unethical Behavior in Online Labor Markets

Cited by 27 publications

References 47 publications

Do truth-telling oaths improve honesty in crowd-working?

Do truth-telling oaths improve honesty in crowd-working?

MTurk Research: Review and Recommendations

Gender differences in sabotage: the role of uncertainty and beliefs

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