Turks need money after expensive weddings

Josh Miller points to this:

“We offered mTurk workers $0.50–$0.75 to complete the survey.”

Why would someone who spent $20k+ on their wedding be filling out a survey on mTurk? Maybe things didn’t turn out so well?

Josh continues:

I didn’t read the paper or the empirical section, just the abstract and I quickly looked at their data source and stopped.

I don’t think mTurk is always bad, just in this case the interaction could be a source of selection bias, and produce an effect mechanically.

I guess you gotta make up that $20K somehow. . . .

11 thoughts on “Turks need money after expensive weddings

  1. I think I need to remind myself that there is always a risk of being quoted!

    Let me re-phrase that: It is an intriguing (published) result that’s a nice fit for your blog and would be fun to discuss. I had a knee-jerk concern, but I stopped short of reading the details cos I didn’t have time. My concerns could be completely misplaced.

  2. FYI, a point of jargon: MTurk is populated by Turkers, only some of whom are Turks. (“Turks” was actually confusing to me, but I’ve also been using MTurk for data eval for a while, so I’ve kinda forgotten what the Turk in MTurk originally was.)

  3. One can recruit a large number of genuinely voluntary participants without any compensation so paerhaps perhaps the reason Turkers participated in this study is not monetary.

Leave a Reply to Daniel Lakeland Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *