Online Labor Market Research

Case Studies, Methods & Questions

Sara C. KingsleyUniversity of Massachusett Amherst

IntroductionHow do we define “online labor market”?

How should we study these markets? (why should we study OLMs?)

What are the open research questions?

What are the important methodological challenges?

What are practitioners doing? Who are the stakeholders?

What are areas for impact? ethics?

Market v. Online Labor Market

Online labor markets buyers and sellers meet, and exchange goods and services via software applications.

The role of the software application:● Match buyers and sellers● Manage quality of service (reputation & ranking)● Pricing & Payments● Record-keeping

CORE economics: https://core-econ.org/

What types of OLMs exist?Labor Markets [occupation, human capital, geography]● Professional, scientific, technical and administrative services● Transportation services (taxi, freight) ● Postal & delivery● Carework, household and labor services● Craft and artistic work

Firms● Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, CrowdSurf, Profilific, Mobileworks, Amara.org● Uber, Lyft, Juno ● Postmates, Deliveroo ● Handy, Care.com

OLM Mechanisms

Matching: how do we match buyers and sellers?

Pricing: how do we determine price & distribute payments?

Task: how do we manage schedule & tasks (distribution, design)?

Information: how do we determine reputation & ranking of buyers & sellers?

Mechanism Design for Social GoodWhat is mechanism design for social good?

How do we answer this question for Online Labor Markets?a. Who are the market participants?

i. Workersii. Consumersiii. Employers (firms, developers)

b. What do they want/need? (How do we answer this?)i. Access to good jobs, equitable economic opportunitiesii. Training and skills development

c. What is a social good? i. mechanisms can change “needs” into the “good” and the “bad” depending on how we answer (b).

Example. A developer builds a software application that connects disabled workers to wage-earning opportunities. The pricing mechanism permits employers to pay disabled workers below the minimum wage. Does this achieve (b)(i) -- access to good jobs, equitable economic opportunities?

Turkopticon

Problem:● Workers lacked information about requesters.

(AMT only provides information about worker reputation, not requesters)

● Some requesters don’t pay wages, post fake or malicious tasks.● Workers who unknowingly do tasks for bad requesters are harmed.● AMT provides little to no incentive for requesters to improve.

Solution ● Design a plugin that allows workers to rate requesters.

Reputation system used by Amazon Mechanical Turks workers to rate employers who post task to the AMT marketplace.

Created by Lily Irani, UCSD, and Six Silberman, IG Metall *

[1] what might workers need?[2] what mechanisms could we build?

National Domestic Work Alliance Fair Care Pledge$25/hour: self-employed

$15/hour: employed by cleaning company

Making sure the work environment is healthy and

safe for the workers.

Clear, open communication between workers and

employers

Access to support, training and professional

development

Airbnb Living Wage Pledge

Case Study: crowd_transcriptCrowd_transcript is a company that distributes transcription, translation and captioning tasks to workers. The tasks are posted to the firm’s OLM and AMT.

Challenge: (1) Workers report that they prefer transcribing shorter versus longer media

files.(2) Task supply shortages.

Research: A/B test labor supply to short/long tasks.

Goal: show how labor supply to tasks could be improved.

Next steps: design a mechanism that will distribute task to the crowd.

Case Study: handy Handy is a company that connects employers to workers who do home cleaning, furniture assembly, renovation, remodeling and repair work.

Challenge: [1] Customers report that it is difficult to find reliable workers via the Handy app. Some customers believe this is because the good workers quickly connect with employers, and then exit the platform.

[2] Reports in online forums indicate that workers might face difficulty with finding reliable transportation to jobs.

Question: what might we do to investigate and fix this market failure?

Food for thought || how is a grocery store different than buying food from instacart?

Grocery store:● Grocery store (the employer)

buys food/goods from suppliers.

● Suppliers sometimes pay a shelving fee.

● Workers are employed by the grocery store to stock shelves with the items from suppliers, take payments from customers at the cash register.

Instacart:● Instacart provides an app that

allows customers to select items from grocery suppliers and have those items delivered to their house.

● Instacart workers buy and deliver requested items to customers.

● Instacart takes payments from customers via the Instacart app.

● Workers pay for the groceries in-store w/Instacart credit card

Questions[1] What is an online labor market?

[2] How do OLMs differ from traditional labor markets?

[3] What are the MD4SG research questions we should ask?

Group discussion[A] describe features of one OLM

[B] name one possible challenge in this market

[C] propose one possible mechanism design solution