by Francis
(July 13, 2012)
Now here is an interesting theory.
“The discussion about the overly low prices on Mechanical Turk focuses on the fact that there are many more workers on Mechanical Turk than employers.”
It seems that doing work and completing a task on Mechanical Turk is easier than putting up a job on Mechanical Turk.
On the other hand, to work on amazon Turk and actually earn some money, you need a US bank account.
I have already showed you how to post a job even if you are not based in the US.
So, this sort of argument does not really work out.
But even if it is true that the work force in Mechanical Turk is huge, I do not think that if there were more employers, prices would change much.
If Mechanical Turk was just to become explosively more popular overnight and indeed ten times as much employers start posting mini jobs on Mechanical Turk, there would just be more workers to do the jobs.
Won’t there?
In my opinion it is simply a free market.
Although the discussion changed my views about minimal wages quite a lot, I still think that the prices on Mechanical Turk, for example for completing a single survey, need to be as low as they are.
If someone wants his survey completed a hundred times, he just cannot afford to pay a dollar for each survey. Such simple jobs will always be this cheap.
The question is “do the workers have a choice to complete these tasks?”
If they see, “Complete my survey for 5 cents”
Are they forced to do that?
Wouldn’t there be many more opportunities to work online and make money except for this one?
Read what my virtual assistant thinks for this theory:
“I agree with the above theory to some extent.
The quantity of providers are rapidly increasing with every passing day and majority of the new comers are students and even minors from poor countries.
$1 for one hour’s work is a pretty handsome money for such persons who apparently do not have any financial or domestic commitments.
Therefore employers are getting benefit from this demand and supply conflict by hiring people at low prices.”
Comments for Prices on Mechanical Turk are so low because there are not enough buyers for all the workers
| Jun 22, 2014 | Effort wasted In my own perspective, the reason why Mechanical Turk offers a low scheming task is to arouse the attention of both employer and employee. But the low scheming pay is not very beneficial to the employee since it demands time and effort before it can sum up to a generous amount of money. |
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